Last night the city of Berlin offered another special event: their 24th Museum Night – Lange Nacht der Museen. For one small price you get admission to most of the city’s museums from 6pm to 2am. This is a great opportunity to get out and see some of the remarkable collections and galleries here in Berlin.

One of the highlights, and certainly the most anticipated museum I wanted to visit, was the Buchstabenmuseum. They are only open sporadically, so it is normally difficult to get an opportunity to stop by.

I was a bit surprised by the small space, but the up side to this was how every square meter was covered with old letters from signs. Large dimensional letters were standing, laying, leaning, hanging, and stacked throughout the two showrooms. The haphazard, jumbled arrangements made it a bit difficult to fully appreciate the signs and the lettering, but they are none-the-less beautiful and interesting. Personally, I am mostly into the nice letters, and less actually the history behind them; but whenever possible, the letters/signs have tags indicating where they came from, the typeface in use, and a little extra info. If you are more interested in some finer details of what is in this collection, Dan Reynolds has some images and font IDs up at his flickr and blog. That guy is crazy, he visited the museum, got home, and blogged about it before I was even there!

On a side note, the Buchstabenmuseum reminds me quite a bit of the boneyard in Las Vegas Neon Museum – albeit a smaller, climate controlled, more sanitary version. Someday, we should all make the trek there because it looks incredible. Paul Hunt visited in 2008 and has some great photos in flickr.

Update:
Core 77 has many more great photos of the museum here