Illustrations from Mechanick Exercises of English (left) and Blaeu (right) style presses.

This is the first in a series of posts that will continue throughout the year.

Beginning in late January and continuing through the middle of December, a group of four students at the Rochester Institute of Technology will be designing and building a wooden common printing press to be installed in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection there. The team consists of myself, Seth Gottlieb, Ferris Nicolais and Randall Paulhamus, all Mechanical Engineering majors, and Veronica Hebbard, an Industrial and Systems Engineering major.

While replica common presses have been made before, ours is better described as being a reconstruction, which will be representative of what might have been made, but is not a direct copy. We will perform an engineering analysis of our design to improve it wherever appropriate, but will use historically accurate materials wherever possible.

We aren’t scholars of printing history, but we’re prepared to learn as much as we can. We’ve already collected a lot of information in the weeks since starting the project, and have a much better idea of what we’re doing. Wooden presses changed slowly in the time between Johannes Gutenberg’s development of his press and the birth of iron handpresses in the late eighteenth century. In his Mechanick Exercises, Joseph Moxon described two styles of press, the “old fashion’d” (the English common press) and Blaeu styles.

The main difference between these styles exists in the hose of the press, a component that works in conjunction with the spindle of the press to actuate the platen without rotating it, analogous to the toggle mechanism in later iron handpresses. The hose sits around the spindle of the press, and in the case of the English common press is a hollow wooden box. On the Blaeu style, the hose is an open iron frame that is mounted to the spindle with a collar. These styles existed concurrently, with the Blaeu style never supplanting the former. In England and the American Colonies, the English common press remained dominant, and most surviving examples in North America are of this style.

Our team plans on visiting surviving presses from this period held around the U.S. and Canada, and hopes to photograph and measure these presses to collect a set of data from which to create our design (I’ll also be writing here about the trips we take). Because most presses available to us are built in the style of the English common press, we will be building one as well. However, our press will not be a hodge-podge of design elements from presses made spanning a period of many years. Instead, we will build a press representative of a narrow window of time, say the 1740s for example. We will determine this window as the project progresses. Several presses have already been thoroughly studied, such as the purported Benjamin Franklin Press held in the Smithsonian Institution detailed by Elizabeth Harris and Clinton Sisson in their 1978 work, The Common Press. Our studies of other presses will likely not be so thorough.

We’re only just embarking on this journey, and I invite you to join us. Come December, we will have a full operable press on public display in the Cary Collection. Additionally, we’ll be publishing the full details of our design, along with a structural analysis of it, so that anyone could construct a press based upon ours. Soon we’ll have an Instagram account to share photos, which I’ll be announcing in a future post. If you would like a more technical view than the narrative I’m offering here, check out our project website: http://edge.rit.edu/edge/P16510/public/Home. Eventually the page will contain all the documentation relating to our project. Our contact information is available there, and I welcome anyone to drop me a line at sjg6582@rit.edu. In a future post, I’ll be writing about an upcoming trip to the Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum in Queenston, Ontario, so stay tuned!