A museum about letters has to get its own sign right. The name runs across the south wing of the Büsing-Palais in wide, thin capitals, spaced out over the windows — the first exhibit, before the door.
At a glance
The Klingspor Museum is Offenbach’s municipal collection of modern and contemporary book art, typography and calligraphy. It began with one man’s library: Karl Klingspor (1868–1950) ran the Gebrüder Klingspor type foundry in this town, and the foundry cut some of the faces that defined German printing around 1900 — Otto Eckmann’s Eckmann and Peter Behrens’s Behrens Roman, both released in 1900. The museum holds the designs, the proofs and the correspondence behind that work, which is rarer than holding the books.
Key facts
- What it is: a municipal museum of book art, typography and calligraphy
- Founded: 1953, on Karl Klingspor’s private collection
- Where: Herrnstraße 80, south wing of the Büsing-Palais, 63065 Offenbach am Main
- Open: Tuesday to Thursday 13:00–18:00; Friday 14:00–21:00; Saturday, Sunday and public holidays 11:00–18:00; closed Monday
- Admission: €4 full, €3 seniors, €2.50 reduced, free on Fridays and for under-18s; cash only at the desk
- Website: klingspor-museum.de
History
Karl Klingspor collected while he worked. By his death in 1950 he had gathered close to three thousand books of contemporary book art, among them editions from the Kelmscott Press, the Cranach Presse and the Wiener Werkstätte. The most valuable he had bound by hand by Ignatz Wiemeler, so the collection also amounts to a survey of one bookbinder’s output. Offenbach turned the whole of it into a public museum in 1953.
What arrived later is what makes the place a working archive rather than a display of fine printing. The museum keeps the papers of Rudolf Koch, Ernst Schneidler, Rudo Spemann, Marcus Behmer, Hugo Steiner-Prag, Werner Klemke and Rudolf von Larisch, together with type specimens, drawings and letters from the Gebrüder Klingspor foundry itself: the record of how decisions about letterforms were actually taken in the first half of the twentieth century. It also holds the largest collection of the Dutch typographer Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman outside the Netherlands, and the Frans Masereel collection given by Paul Ritter.
The building was restored in 2011, following the historic model, with a storey added and the provisional flat roof replaced.
What you see
The museum occupies the south wing of the Büsing-Palais, a nineteenth-century villa with a mansard roof and a stone balustrade along the terrace. The wing was rebuilt upwards in 2011, and the join shows: below, the round-arched windows and rusticated door of the old house; above, a flat glazed band that belongs to the present.
Inside, the library is open to visitors. The exhibition rooms change several times a year; the permanent display, Klingspor permanent, holds the ground.
Practical information
- Closed Mondays; open late on Friday, when admission is free.
- The ticket desk takes cash only.
- A combined ticket with the neighbouring Haus der Stadtgeschichte costs €5.
- Every two years the museum runs Hot Printing, a printing festival; it also shares the Druckwerkstatt, a working print shop in the Bernardbau, with the city history museum.
Getting there
Offenbach lies immediately east of Frankfurt and is served by the S-Bahn from Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. The museum is in the centre of Offenbach, on Herrnstraße, within walking distance of the Marktplatz.
Nearby
- The Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Offenbach’s city history museum, next door.
- The Bernardbau, which houses the print workshop the two museums run together.
- Frankfurt’s Museumsufer, twenty minutes away by S-Bahn.
Sources
- Stadt Offenbach, Klingspor Museum — admission and contact — current opening hours, prices and address.
- Klingspor Museum — the museum’s own description of its scope.
- German Wikipedia, Klingspor-Museum — foundation in 1953, the Wiemeler bindings, the archives held, the 2011 restoration and Hot Printing.
- English Wikipedia, Klingspor Type Foundry — Eckmann and Behrens Roman, both 1900.
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Events here — now on & upcoming
- Aus der Mitte Europas. Tschechische Buchkunst von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart — Klingspor Museum, Offenbach05 Sep 2026 — 29 Nov 2026See the event →
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