MICA Buys Globe Poster Company

The @baltimoreprints Twitter feed alerted us this afternoon to news that many music nerds, graphic design heads, and printmakers have been waiting and hoping to hear:

BREAKING NEWS: MICA will be purchasing the Baltimore Globe Poster collection. Preservation through production. So very exciting. Please RT.

Globe Poster, known far beyond Baltimore for its letterpress show posters with their vibrant inks and eye-grabbing design, had shut down in summer 2010. As recently reported in City Paper, the Cicero family, which has owned and run Globe for nearly 40 years, had been hoping to keep Globe’s unrivaled collection of letterpress type, print-block “cuts,” vintage photographs, and posters together to be used and valued as a unique whole rather than auction it off piecemeal to collectors. MICA was rumored to be among the organizations interested in purchasing all or part of the company’s assets.

MICA Provost Ray Allen was temporarily unavailable for comment but A MICA spokesperson confirms that the acquisition is going forward, and Mary Mashburn, who has worked to find a buyer for Globe as a member of the ad hoc organization Friends of Globe, confirms the existence of a deal.

“We got news today that MICA is going to take substantial part of the Globe collection,” Mashburn says by phone. “The agreement isn’t inked, so the details will be have to be worked out ,” she adds,  but a “significant representation of the collection” will relocate to MICA. Mashburn, who runs Hampden-based Typecast Press and teaches letterpress classes as an adjunct faculty member at MICA, says that at least one MICA student who heard about the purchase was “literally crying with joy.”

Watch this space for details as they become available.

Tags: Globe Poster Company, letterpress, MICA