NOW HERE'S something really new from the BBC: a real-life programme about neighbours who, unusually, are not seething with mutual hatred and indignation, nor going to court to resolve disputes. We've always done things on the shoestring of a shoestring."! The Type Museum opens on 2 December and can be contacted at PO Box 15018, London SW9 0ZU. The museum will not be a static institution, chained to the past, but an active participant in the communications industry.The Type Museum is now applying to the Lottery for funding to revamp the buildings and add a lecture theatre. "We've been wonderfully helped by the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Science Museum in buying our collections, but we've never had money for running costs.

Most of the standard textfaces on modern computer systems derive from the Monotype archive, and professional type- setting techniques are no longer generally taught or practised. At the museum we try to use computer typesetting fonts to their best possible advantage and to encourage students to do the same."Shaw has big plans for education and general proselytising about the importance of letterforms in all our lives. Her four staff who, she says, don't make mistakes because they don't know how, demonstrate each aspect of the process for me. "We have rescued our national printing and typographic heritage so that a generation raised on the computer can learn how these rich and varied materials can provide inspiration for the effective communications of the future.

Watching, listening, and smelling, almost tasting the machines as they grunt and whirr is an exhilarating and sensual experience - industrial archaeology at its best.However, historical technology is just the beginning of what the Type Museum is about, says Susan Shaw. It's like understanding your first opera, or eating your first really good meal or drinking fine malt for the first time.She takes me through the various stages of the Monotype manufacturing process, from the foot-high pattern drawings, through the copper patterns, to the punches and the striking of the matrix. I'm converted - since then I look at every page I read with a critical eye, and find very few are as right as those that Susan Shaw showed me that day. And this index." I had to admit that even the index was beautiful And I could, to my surprise, see why Everything was just, well, right. See how it invites you to read it." She turns the pages, "Look, even this, a table, is beautiful.