House of Words - Chamber of Printing

What to expect

The House of Words - Chamber of Printing in Lublin is a letterpress works that still runs its machines. Before you walk over, know that there is no dropping in for a look. Entry is by guided tour only, at 11:00 and 15:00, and the tour takes 60 to 90 minutes. Turn up at 12:30 and you get the free gallery and nothing else.

For a visitor without Polish, the deciding question is the guide. A tour in English exists, costs half as much again as the Polish one and has to be booked ahead. No source says the rooms carry English labels, so without that booking you would be following a Polish commentary through rooms of iron and lead. With it, you get an hour among working machines rather than glass cases.

Lubelski.pl, a regional portal, ran a photo feature by Joanna Jarosz from inside the rooms. Its highlights are a hand-operated Boston press of 1903, German bookbinding presses over a century old, and a lithography room with a Leipzig-built Karl Krause press of about 1904 and more than twenty stones. The composing room has a Planeta Fixia, a machine of which only a few survive worldwide, according to Polish Wikipedia citing a 2016 Gazeta Wyborcza report.

The second permanent exhibition, “Siła Wolnego Słowa” (The Power of the Free Word), moves to the underground publishing of 1976-1989: periodicals, books and filmed testimony from the people who printed them, according to Wikipedia. The temporary shows in the gallery are free and need no guide. On their own they are a fifteen-minute stop if you are passing, not a reason to cross town.

Best for anyone who likes machinery and craft, for typography and graphic-design students, and for readers of Solidarity-era history. Most children under eight will find the tour long; a seven-year-old can join a bookbinding or papermaking workshop, typography starts at eight. With only one day in Lublin, give it to the Old Town and the castle; this is a second-day visit, or a detour for a specific interest.

Tips

• Book the English tour. It costs 45 PLN (35 PLN reduced) against 30 PLN in Polish and runs only by prior reservation. E-mail domslow@tnn.lublin.pl or call 81 534 52 33 a few days before. The fixed 11:00 and 15:00 entries are the Polish tours.
• Group size depends on the page. The Centre’s newer visiting and planning pages cap a permanent-exhibition group at 15 and split larger parties; the accessibility statement says 10. A family of four is safe either way; a party of twelve should ask. The same planning page sets no age limit for the exhibitions and allows pets.
• Buy the pass at Grodzka 21 first. A 30-day pass covering this venue, the Grodzka Gate, the Lublin Underground Route and Fortuna’s Cellar costs 95 PLN (67 PLN reduced). Only the information desk at ul. Grodzka 21 sells it. That desk is 400 m away as the crow flies, so stop there on your way down from the Old Town.
• Reduced and free entry. Tickets are sold at the Żmigród door and in the Centre’s online shop. Pupils, students, pensioners, people with disabilities and Large Family Card holders pay the reduced 20 PLN with a document. Carers are where the pages disagree: the accessibility statement admits a disabled visitor’s carer free, as it does one adult per ten pupils, while the visiting page charges carers the reduced rate.
• Make something to take home. The workshops are booked separately: 90 minutes of typography, bookbinding or papermaking for 40 PLN (30 PLN reduced), groups of 5 to 8, slots between 10:00 and 16:00. No source says they run in English, so ask when you book; a hand-bound notebook needs little translation.
• Saturdays all year. From October 2026 the House of Words no longer has a summer and a winter schedule: tours run Monday to Saturday, with entries at 11:00 and 15:00. Buy tickets at bilety.teatrnn.pl, at the information centre at Grodzka 21 (Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00, tel. 81 532 58 67) or on site if they have not sold out.
• Wheelchair users reach one exhibition. The Power of the Free Word is accessible from the yard at ul. Królewska 17, but the printing rooms are a flight of stairs down. Expect a steep gateway and an uneven yard on the Królewska side.
• Sign-language workshops on request. Selected workshops can be interpreted into Polish Sign Language (PJM) if you write to alina.januszczyk@tnn.lublin.pl ; PJM video descriptions of the workshops are at czytanieobrazow.pl.

Getting there

The museum is at ul. Żmigród 1, on the slope just below the Old Town, a few dozen metres from the Archcathedral. Lublin Główny station is 1.6 km away as the crow flies, the castle 550 m.

• Bus: stops Brama Krakowska 01, 02 and 04, served by lines 5, 6, 17, 22, 24, 25, 29, 39, 52, 156, 160, 950 and night lines N1 and N2. Stops 02 and 04 are on the museum’s side of the street.
• On foot: three minutes from the Kraków Gate towards the Archcathedral, five from the Old Town Market Square, about fifteen from the castle hill.
• Two entrances: tours start from ul. Żmigród 1; the second entrance is through the gateway at ul. Królewska 17, on the left inside the yard.
• By car: the car park in front of the Archcathedral (entry from ul. Królewska) is paid around the clock; the one on Żmigród itself is paid Monday to Friday, 08:00-17:00. Both are unguarded and both have marked disabled bays. You can park in the museum’s yard if you tell them in advance.

Nearby

A day built around the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre works best with the pass bought at its Grodzka 21 desk in the morning. The Lublin Underground Route and Fortuna’s Cellar lie under the Market Square on the same pass, and both are guided-only too, so fix all three tour times before you set out.

The Chamber of Memory of the Jews of Lublin on ul. Lubartowska belongs to the same Centre but is not on the pass. If you take the 11:00 tour here and want something before lunch, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin is in the Kraków Gate, two minutes from the Żmigród door.

Background

Much of the machinery you see came from the press that worked here before the war, Polish Wikipedia notes. That press, “Popularna”, was bought in 1932 by two Lublin printers, Aleksander Michalski and Józef Rybiński; the poet Józef Łobodowski, now the chamber’s patron, printed most of his books with them.

Many of the presses on the tour, then, are ones this shop ran during the war, when it printed for the resistance as well as for the occupier. From 1943, Polish Wikipedia records, Popularna worked for the Polish Underground alongside its German orders. The Centre’s history explains how: a night shift the authorities had allowed was turned over to leaflets, forged passes and identity papers.

That ended with arrests in March 1944. Zdzisław Kalinowski, Marian Lipski, Aleksander Michalski, Józef Rybicki and Jan Tarkowski, all Popularna printers, were among fifty Lublin Castle prisoners shot at Majdanek on 3 June 1944. (The same history spells Rybicki as Rybiński elsewhere.)

The press outlived them. Zofia Michalska, Aleksander’s widow, restarted it, Wikipedia records, and the Centre dates the restart to November 1944. In 1951 it became a co-operative, later Intrograf, whose management opened a room on Lublin’s printing heritage here in 1981-1983.

After 1989 the room fared badly: the premises decayed and two exhibits listed on the heritage conservator’s record cards went missing. The Teatr NN Centre took over in 2007 and reopened the place as the Chamber of Printing in 2008. It dates the House of Words name to 2015; Wikipedia gives 3 October 2014.