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Retrieving an Iron Handpress

October 21, 2019 by admin

Several months ago, I located an iron handpress in a barn in the mountains of Virginia. The owner himself was not a printer, but had rescued the press from languishing outside in a parking lot. After several exchanges of text-message and phone, I paid him a visit and took several pictures of the press. He was trying not to scrap the press, but did want his barn back for some vintage cars, before the winter if at all possible.

I shared my pictures with several mentors—Bob Oldham (Ad Lib Press), Katherine Ruffin (Wellesley College), Ray Nichols (Lead Graffiti), Amelia Hugill-Fontanel (R.I.T.), and David Wolfe (Wolfe Editions). I’ve wanted to bring an iron handpress into my teaching and lab work for some time—to go back beyond the Vandercook era. In consultation with many, I decided to pursue this press for the lab. It was three hours away, but the price was right and the press seemed to be in pretty good condition. I wrote and received an internal grant, and also received support from the Writing Program and English at Davidson to support the acquisition of the press, and I worked with the college to find temporary space for restoration. (The press will eventually live in the lab, but it needs to be cleaned and painted first, and then the lab needs to be re-configured to get the handpress in).

After several weeks of taking bids for a rigger to move the press, I realized (as usual) that these items cost more to move than they do to purchase or restore, so I resolved to move it myself. I made heavy use of Bob Oldham’s instructions, and was able to do all of the work myself, except for two key moments where I needed a hand on the engine hoist and another on the load. Fortunately, the press’s owner was on hand (enjoying the Sunday show of me disassembling and moving the piece!), and he helped in those crucial moments. I’ll share pictures below, but there’s a tie for best practical advice: Go slow (Bob Oldham), and label your parts (Amelia Hugill-Fontanel). I’d do a few things differently “the next time,” but the press now lives in the basement under my lab, and will be slowly cleaned and restored, for eventual re-emergence. Not bad for a piece of cast-iron that might have printed through the Civil War…

Packing up for the trip: junk pallets, two dollies, engine hoist, & a huge bag of ratchet straps.

Arrival, three hours later at the destination.

It begins: penetrating oil, notebook, camera.

After a good soak with penetrating oil all around, bolts were easier to loosen. Here, the bolts securing the rounce begin to loosen…along with the grime of who knows how long.

Daylight showing between the rounce and brackets…

…so to avoid dropping the rounce, I looped a strap around the bar (here on the near side) and the winters (on the far side).

The bed came off next: two 760# webbing straps double-looped.

I didn’t remove the tympan. I should have, because it flopped around a bit, but it remained unscathed.

Placing the bed on a pallet in the truck (pallets in the truck made it easier to unload on the far end).

I couldn’t remove the pin holding the bar and the toggle link, so I took the whole apparatus off in one piece. To do so, I supported the bar by tying it to the staple, and then removed the pin at the cheek and lifted the bar out of the cheek bracket. At that point, the toggle also came out rather abruptly (I caught both pieces as they fell).

Platen is next…

Using a chain and the hoist, I tried to remove the platen nuts. But there wasn’t enough daylight between the chain and the platen brackets to turn the nuts.

With a double loop of webbing straps, there was enough room to turn the nut.

Those straps were seriously strained, though, so I lowered the platen onto that pallet, removed the webbing straps and replaced them with chains, lifted the platen again, removed the pallet, and then lowered the platen all the way clear of the bolts and free of the staple.

The ribs came off next. Very simple disconnect of the forestay from the front (bottom right in the image) and a hook connecting to the winters (almost dead-center in the image) to remove the ribs. Next: removing the legs from the staple.

To protect the casting, I draped a drop cloth over the staple and then double-looped the chain to the staple and engine lift. This was when the engine lift started to complain a little… It was a long day for the lift!

Iron shims were used to lock the legs to the frame. A few blasts with penetrating oil, and then a few taps with a mallet knocked them out. One leg came off immediately; the other took some coaxing.

Here is where I needed a lunch break. I put the staple down to adjust the chain to a side column to transport to the truck. I put the staple down on a pallet, but two things happened: (1) I ended up putting the column I wanted to lift away from my access-point with the engine hoist, and (2) I neglected to account for the length of chain and the depth of the engine hoist—in other words, I didn’t have enough slack in the chain to lower the staple all the way to the floor. So, I stacked some pallets to “bring the floor to me.” This worked, but it made engine-hoist access even trickier, and my hoist had casters only on the back wheels. So it was some tricky three-point turning. Anyway, I got the staple back up and chained on the near column in the image above. This involved balancing the staple for a moment on its side while the former owner and I unchained it and re-chained it at a longer length. A little tricky, a lot nerve-wracking, not recommended, and I wouldn’t do it that way again…

But, there it goes. I tied the staple loosely to the hoist, to prevent it from swinging.

At the absolute height of the engine hoist…

Staple “secured” to a stack of pallets to prevent it from resting fully on its winters. I was nervous riding on the highway—bumps, cast iron, etc.—but we made it. Were I to load again, I would have laid the staple on the pallets, not beside them, and then lowered so the staple came to rest on its side on the pallets. Putting it alongside the pallets made it difficult to rotate the staple over as I’d intended—too much weight for the bottom column to act like a proper hinge. Lesson learned. The gentleman in the back is the former owner.

Ready as I’ll ever be. I left at 6:30 AM. Arrived at 10:30. Finished disassembly and loaded by 3:30, headed on the road and arrived home at 8 PM. A long day…

We tied the staple up to clear space to remove the other items on pallets.

We then laid the staple over onto a stack of pallets, so the winters would clear the floor.

The ribs are laid across the staple here, and the whole thing is strapped together into a block to avoid wobbling.

Huge thanks to these awesome guys, who showed up without knowing what I had in the truck. They were definitely not expecting a cast iron press from ca. 1860.
Going down the hall…

Final destination: an unfinished room in the basement. Here I’ll clean, de-rust, and re-paint.

Temporarily at rest. A long 24 hours for a press that’s about 160 years old…

Moby-Dick Extracts 2019: Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Libraries

September 5, 2019 by admin

After many months of intermittent work, a long and ongoing project is finally complete. I’m very happy to be a part of the international bicentennial celebration of Herman Melville and his 1851 Moby-Dick, as curated by the Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). This project took several months, and is now (as of today) on its way across the Atlantic for collection among 79 other “extracts;” together, these will make up the total set of quotations, allusions, references, and other mentions compiled “by a sub-sub-librarian” at the beginning of the novel. Mine (#58) was drawn from the nonfiction narrative of Mr. Owen Chace, who survived a “stoving in” by whale in the Pacific Ocean.

I was interested in this extract because the Chace narrative was important not only to Melville but also to one of his most ardent readers and advocates in the mid-20th century, Charles Olson. There’s a lot to say about Olson’s Call Me Ishmael—an idiosyncratic poet-scholar’s take on the genesis, themes, writing, and impact of the novel—but I had in the back of my mind Olson’s extrapolation from Moby-Dick of what he calls one of the central facts of America and American life; that is, the sheer broadness of the continent, the expansive space of the place. Or, as he phrases it, “Large, and without mercy.”

With this in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to work with both the whiteness and the bigness of the whale and the sea. And (perhaps again channeling Olson, who turned this sense of space and place into a plastic, typographic poetics of the page—what he called “projective verse”), I wanted to do something where the typography was performative and expressive. Finally, given Melville’s attention to the archive(s) of the whale, and in turn his own contemporary status as part of the literary bedrock (or sub-current) of the American cannon, I wanted there to be more than simply the extract itself (however finely and/or adventurously printed).

What I came up with was a large-format print (larger than the technical size of my press, at 14″ by 22″–deckle to deckle and edge to edge), combining several printing techniques, several sizes of type, and at least one “collision” between the various archives before and after Melville’s Moby-Dick. The final print was executed through four print runs, combining printing from a magnesium die, a plexiglass plate (engraved by laser and then pressure printed), non-orthographic text from 18-line Gothic wood type down to 10-point Craw Clarendon, and a final colophon added outside the normal printing area of the press through the use of a frisket carrier sheet. I include images in the following, with short captions narrating the various stages. I’ll post a high-quality image of the final print soon.

Magnesium die locked up in the bed of the press. The text here is from an early review of Melville’s *Moby-Dick*. Early, and not entirely positive… You can’t read it in these images, but it’s definitely worth reading.

A small portion of the die needed to be removed. Done by hand, using a hacksaw.

Printing the block. Note the size of the sheet… Also note the black and white whale images to the right; those are test plates cut from plexiglass to test line-work and fidelity of the plate under ink and pressure.

Preparing for the next pass: cutting a mount for a plexiglass plate.

The plexiglass plate as mounted. I used indoor/outdoor carpet tape, easily available at the local hardware store and able to withstand both solvents and lateral pressure. I also really like the criss-cross pattern of the threads in the tape…

The die still on the press and the plexiglass plate ready to go. They will be closely registered.

A small amount of Process Cyan plus a healthy dose of transparent white for the plexiglass plate.

Adjusting the effect. In this early pass, I came to call this version the whale “breaching.” In later passes, I re-aligned the image so that the whale just crests at the margin of the text.

Working with wood type to design the text.

Almost ready to move to the bed of the press.

In the process of being locked up. Yes, there’s a pica stick on the rail. Thankfully, I’m the only person in the lab over the summer…

Initially, the quotation was to have been white (for a white-on-white effect). The opaque white produced an unsatisfactory “vanilla” on the stock I was using. The same thing occurred with a pure transparent white, too (though I’m fond of that effect on other colors–trans white on red, black, and blue stocks can be very appealing).

The proof on my test wall. This proof was in two colors–which, I decided against. Here, I’m working on an issue with the baseline of a comma in some closely leaded lines in the wood font I’m using.

And here, on the bed of the press. The solution was to break the lower lead, drop the comma down by an 18-point quad, and lock up around this. A smarter person would have done this from the start. Lessons…

Comma: before and after. Still a two-color proof at this point–hand-brayed to test colors.

There was some unacceptable paper-texture in the large wood type. Printing large fields of black on white made any small breaking of the black immediately obvious, and if I couldn’t print white on white, I wanted my black to be *black*. So I resolved to dampen the paper. Someone smarter would have caught the comma; I realized after the fact that someone more *poetic* would have stirred a little salt into this water to make it just a little more like the ocean. Regardless, I enjoyed this metaphoric hydrophilia on the penultimate run (of a text about sinking…)

Dampening each sheet on the press immediately before printing.

I like deckled edges, and keep them whenever I can. However, I also wanted to add a colophon at the very bottom of the print, *and* keep it in register, as much as possible, with the bottom edge of my “ocean.” Designing a straight line next to a deckle, as in the above, is kind of asking for trouble. During printing, I placed a straight-edge back from the feed-table on the Vandercook, and then marked a line from the paper-guide back, and placed a galley magnet along that line. That way, the long edge of the print could be straight (between that magnet and the paper guide), even if the deckle was tough to align in the grippers.

My design posed further problems, in that if I wanted the colophon below my “ocean,” I needed to find a way to extend the leading edge of the paper where it’s gripped by the press.

One option was painter’s tape on the tympan. Instead, I cut a frisket carrier sheet, with a window where the quotation would land. I fed the carrier sheet into the grippers, and let the grippers close on the carrier sheet. Then, I slid the actual print beneath the carrier sheet while still on the feed table. I could align the bottom edge of my “ocean” with the top edge of the printable window. While the print wasn’t gripped by the press, there was enough tension between the carrier sheet and the tympan (with my left hand in the normal printing position) to pull my print through the press without affecting alignment.

In the end, I used a thinner stock, to get a fuller strike on the pass. This is the first print from the final run.

The Vandercook #4

July 2, 2019 by admin

Almost a year to the day after pulling it out of a barn in central New York, the first print came off the Vandercook #4 today. The press is still not pretty, but it prints.

In lieu of a longer more prosaic post, I’ll simply post a few images and captions. The first print, here on July 2, is a quotation from Walt Whitman, as transcribed by Horace Traubel and published in his With Walt Whitman in Camden. Reacting against tariffs, Whitman erupts with “The spirit of the tariff is malevolent: it flies in the face of all American ideals: I hate it root and branch: it helps a few rich men to get rich, it helps the great mass of poor men to get poorer: what else does it do? Nothing that I can see.”

But more than income inequality, Whitman goes on to connect the idea of a tariff in the abstract with the founding ideals of the nation, immediately following the above with “If America is not for freedom I do not see what it is for. We ought to invite the world through an open door—all men—yes, even the criminals—giving to everyone a chance—a new outlook. My God! are men always to go on clawing each other—always to go on taxing, stealing, warring, having a class to exclude and a class excluded—always to go on having favorite races, favorite castes—a few people with money here and there—all the rest without anything everywhere?”

I set up this print as a demonstration for my July Experience class; on July 4th we’ll print the first sentence of Whitman’s response–“If America is not for Freedom I do not see what it is for.” It seems apt not only as a first print on a restored press, not only as an occasional print for the July 4 holiday, but also at this particular time, when the spirit of the tariff that Whitman excoriates seems again to be ascendant, exacerbating economic inequalities and issues at the nation’s borders.

Motor Update

June 20, 2019 by admin

No pictures today, but I was able to mount the motor (new from Grainger), and replace the flat pulleys for v-belt pulleys. “I was able” is putting it mildly: you should see the faces of the Grainger sales technicians when I pull a 1.5″ wide flat pulley, 6″ in diameter out of a bag and ask them to try to match it. “Oh, they don’t make those any more…” I removed the original Vandercook pulley at the speed-reducer, and mounted a v-belt pulley there and at the motor hub. Added a new belt, and then got a little help with actual wiring–from the press to the wall; from the junction box to the motor; from the motor to the switch.

Well, just one picture… Here’s the motor, fresh from the box.

Rewiring happened while I was away for a few days; when I came back, lovely new cord (grounded plug!) and conduit through the press. One of our physical plant experts came in to check to make sure the polarity on the motor was correct–counter-clockwise or clock-wise. Down one cup of coffee and after a long day of driving, I confirmed the wrong direction, and Alan promptly opened up the motor-housing and switched the polarity of the motor. I’m really glad I watched him do this, because about 10 minutes after he left to attend another job (and then another, and another, and another…thank you, Physical Plant!), I realized I’d confirmed the wrong direction. So, deep breath, I opened up the motor to un-undo and re-reverse what Alan had done.

I won’t deny that when I buttoned the motor back up I was a l-i-t-t-l-e proud and a lot scared; and I also won’t deny that to check my work I turned the press on with a piece of wood furniture instead of my bare finger…just in case. Happily, Alan is a good teacher. Press now turns in the correct direction. I let it run a minute or two, just to enjoy the sight of a formerly frozen press, left in a barn for maybe 30+ years, turning over and awaiting a new job. Then I noticed some chain slap.

The drive chain was loose enough to jump a little and hit the chain guard when the motor turned on, and loose enough to hit the bottom of the channel it runs through on its path to the ink drum. On closer inspection, I noticed that the chain had even begun to notch a groove in the metal (years ago; not while I was admiring the motor). I remembered Paul Moxon teaching how to remove a link from the drive chain, but I also noticed that the speed reducer on this #4 was adjustable: a hex bolt in the back, and a slotted screw between the reducer and the press (not too easy to get to). I loosened both of these and then re-tightened them while holding the reducer taut to the back of the press.

Tighten everything back up; hold your breath; flip the switch. No wood furniture this time. No chain slap this time, either. Looking forward to putting everything back together in a day or two: new rollers, to be adjusted with a new gauge from Boxcar; packing and tympan that were stored in the press; cleaned oscillating and rider rollers; cleaned gripper bar. For that, I will have a picture or two…

Happy Birthday, Walt.

June 6, 2019 by admin

Friday, May 31, 2019, was Walt Whitman’s bicentennial. Since doing a print workshop with one of my nineteenth-century American literature classes a few years ago, I’ve had in the shop a magnesium die of the famous image at the front of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The stance and attitude projected in that image go hand in hand with the tone of that great long poem–but I also love seeing how that image works with other texts. (Once, in the gentle run-down toward the Thanksgiving holiday, students and I assembled a quick print with the image and some wood type, and thus was born the Whitman meme “POETRY IS BETTER THAN TURKEY.” Yup; the image goes with that, too!).

To mark the bicentennial of the poet and printer, I put together a little booklet. As noted in the colophon, the text collages language by and about Walt Whitman (from The Walt Whitman Archive) with the assorted flavors of the Whitman’s Sampler.

Seven spreads, front and back; printed as a work-and-turn on seven different stocks. “Sampler” indeed.

Multiplying this image makes me happy. And somehow, the Warholian repetition of this image also chimes with Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes…”. The book is constructed from seven spreads, printed front and back. There are fifteen candies but only fourteen different flavors in the 12 oz. Whitman’s Sampler; one flavor–the Toffee Chip–occurs twice in the box. “The Great Laws do not treasure chips…”

While the idea behind the project emerged from the coincidence of their shared last names (Stephen Whitman was a confectioner in Philadelphia, and I don’t think there’s any relation, but I could be wrong…!), I was surprised at how quickly the concept tipped me back into those most moving elements of Whitman’s life and work–his work as a nurse during the Civil War, and his recording of that work in his stunning book, Memoranda During the War. Before medical science could catch up to military technology and heal what humans do to themselves with their own inventions, Whitman kept long, exhausting hours tending to men who would almost certainly die from perforated bowels or irreparably damaged limbs. (In dark coincidence, the overflow of wounded were housed in the U.S. Patent Office, where Whitman observes models of technological advancement among the injured and dying.).

One of the first passages in the book depicts a pile of uncounted amputated hands, scattered like a toppled cord of wood. It’s a heartbreaking book, made more so by the apparent practical futility of much of Whitman’s efforts. Despite being unable to improve their prospects of survival or recovery, Whitman kept tending to the wounded, and carried both stationery and candy and sweet drinks; writing letters for those who couldn’t write home, and handing out sweet treats to men who were closer to boyhood than he was. So while my Sampler began as a pun, it reminded me again of why I love and am moved by the poet. There are of course actual candies and appreciations of sweets in his poems, but it’s a testament to his work that such a silly project as this can again uncover the deepest and most enduring of his themes.

Work in Progress

May 28, 2019 by admin

Between restoration milestones, summer print-work proceeds. Whitman’s birthday is coming up, by the way…

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