A Press All My Own
Over the years I’ve worked on and restored several printing presses for the State Capital Publishing museum. I’ve gotten to work on numerous prints, for posters, for coasters, for promotional cards, and even for my own purposes. But for each of these I have always relied upon the presses located on museum grounds. I can’t exactly take a working press home hahaha…
The problem is that an even semi-functional press in the printing community can go anywhere from 300 - 1,000 dollars. Thanks to a minor obsession with Facebook Marketplace though I was able to acquire two presses I could confidently call my own. (Note that both these presses were acquired before I bought the Challenge Proof Press discussed in the last Article).
The first I Acquired, and the star of today’s article is a Kelsey Excelsior Mercury Model N, Serial# A84H. Which when decoded tells us this press was made in August of 1984. I saw the press on FB marketplace and drove all the way to Altus, Oklahoma to pick it up in February of 2025. According to the guy who sold it to me, it was used in a local print shop that served the local Air Force Base. The shop closed down several months before I bought the press and the he said that he didn’t know where any of the other equipment went.
A couple of months later I had the wild idea to restore the press in time for a friends wedding, with the idea of printing wedding cards on it live at the reception. So in June of 2025 I made swift progress in cleaning up the press itself. Thankfully I didn’t need to completely disassemble the press since underneath the many layers of dried ink and grime, the original paint job was actually fairly decent. There was minimal rust over most of the parts that I was able to remove without much issue.
There WERE some parts that I had to get new for the press. While the back-plate was thankfully still there, and the platen wasn’t damaged. The chase was missing and the composition rollers had completely disintegrated (as they tend to do). But these Kelsey presses are popular enough that I was able to go online and buy a new chase and two new rollers with roller bearings. It only cost me about 3x more than I paid for the press itself.
Unfortunately for me, waiting for the parts took a long time and by the time I got them in early September of 2025. I was feeling an existential dread for the wedding which was going to take place during the same weekend as my birthday. I just didn’t feel great about attending a wedding after spending so many years trying and failing to find a partner myself. So I told my friend I couldn’t make it and just stayed home, wallowing in my sadness.
Ostensibly at this point the press was mostly finished. I had all the parts installed. The only thing I was missing was the Base and re-adjusting the press to calibrate it for printing. The press sat in my hobby room for 6 months, till March when in a spurt of motivation I knocked out a base for it on a Sunday, while working on several other projects.
And then it sat again.
There are a lot of factors for these long periods of time between working on the press. Feeling a bit dejected by factors beyond the project. Satisfied with the results of working on it. But I feel the biggest factor is that after I did all this. I had this beautiful machine that was in pristine condition. The moment that I did anything with the press, there would be no going back. You can never get the ink off of it, not completely.
But these machines were made to be used. To serve a purpose, and to relegate them to being a mere display of times past is an incredible disservice to their intended purpose. So the other day after delivering the Challenge Proof Press to the museum, I pulled the Kelsey off the shelf and started hand setting a quote as I have come to do to commission a press.
I spent about 4 hours hand setting the type while listening to some music using type that I acquired from a print-shop that was closing down. Then inked up the press and spent the better part of an afternoon adjusting and calibrating the press so it prints cleanly. I think it could still use some minor adjustments, but overall the press prints nicely and is no longer it’s perfect, pristine state. Now it has the shadows of my signature Purple ink over it.
I didn’t expect the catharsis I would feel from seeing the press in operation. But to see these machines in operation, doing what they were designed and built to do is incredibly satisfying. Here in June, a year since I restored it, it returns to service. I’m sorry it took so long.
