Free Printing Press! (Some manufacture and assembly required)

Have you ever found yourself wishing for a printing press built to authentic nineteenth-century standards? Of course you have. And fortunately T.C. Hansard has anatomized the press and provided a detailed description of its parts, in his 1825 Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing.

If you decide not to go all-out and build a press from the instructions, the wood engravings could be printed, cut out and used to build your own paper model of a press. Better yet, download a 3D modeling program, spend a few weekends and evenings creating models of each part, and then send them to a 3D printer. (Please send photos if you choose this route.)

In either case, here are the images:

p. 552

p. 553

p. 554

p. 555

p. 556

p. 557

p. 558

p. 559

p. 560

p. 561

p. 562

p. 563

p. 564

p. 565

p. 566

p. 567

p. 568

p. 569

p. 570

p. 571

p. 572

p. 573

p. 574

Advertisement