Book

A Field Guide to North American Hand Presses and Their Manufacturers is designed and written to assist in the identification of “mystery presses” as well as to help the reader better understand the place of the individual examples in the pantheon of printing machines. It gives historical, contextual, and chronological information about the hand presses that may be found in museums, academic studios, printing companies, and private collections. This book is an important and useful addition to the library of any owner of a hand press, whether museum, corporation, or individual, as well as those who are curious about the fascinating history of these machines. It was commercially printed and bound.

A major goal for A Field Guide to North American Hand Presses and Their Manufacturers is to encourage printers, hobbyists, and the curious to seek out these remarkable specimens of printing technology of the past. The Field Guide is currently available for purchase from the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts (email: Info@museumofprinting.org)

As a result of my interest in the Neolithic archaeology of Portugal I researched and wrote a novella-length book, a fictional description of an actual journey by sea made about 7500 years ago from the Anatolia/Black Sea region to Southwestern Iberia, to portray the probable experience of a village of refugees from a disastrous flood while fleeing the flood in small boats and seeking a new rich land where they could continue farming and raising domestic animals. Escape from Terror was printed by hand in 2018 on my own press using hand-set type and bound by me, in an edition of 50 copies.

My studies of wooden and iron hand presses resulted in the Hand Press Compendium which I wrote and printed in 2021 by hand with hand-set type, using the wooden "replica" I built of the prototype printing press made by George Medhurst about 1805 using the torsion toggle he invented; the edition was 25 copies which I also bound by hand.