The museum is entirely devoted to the typographer Giambattista Bodoni, who invented new typographical characters, later known as Bodonian, and as the head of Parma Royal Printing Works from 1768, managed to transform it in an international printing centre endowed with excellent quality standards.
Here are preserved about 80.000 original tools and items: punches, presses, perforating dies, the original matrixes and boxes of alphabet of the Printing Works, still used today for printing particularly precious works. In the archive is kept a collection of works and rare prints: among them, the most precious is certainly the greek version of Iliad printed in 1808.