Was a Chandler and Price from 1899 when I was a junior in art school. It belonged to the father of a person in North Jersey. He printed small pamphlets and Holiday cards for the most part. It was in good condition for not being used in 20 plus years, but it was in the basement. The house might have been built around it.
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My brother and I disassembled it to its smallest parts, taking as many pictures as I could. We dragged all 1,800 lbs of iron and steel up those old wooden stairs and onto a pickup truck and drove it down the shore to my Grandmother’s garage. I carefully cleaned each piece and painted it a dazzling green. My Uncle Lyle and I reassembled it all in the next few months. He really loved seeing all the mechanics of this 19th century wonder, especially when we gave the curved spoke flywheel a turn and it seemed to run almost forever under its own inertia.
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Sadly Lyle passed away shortly after and never got to see anything printed with it. I went off to finish college and moved to San Francisco before I had time to ink up the disk. The press sat oiled up and wrapped to prevent rust for quite some time. Eventually my family started to complain of the undue burden to my grandmother and I had to sell it.
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I wasn’t around for the day it moved out of the garage to a trailer from a guy who bought it off of me. I was happy for the money though. I put it towards buying our first press for the shop in San francisco. I thought it was going to be the last time I ever saw that press again...until the other day
I had a message from Haley show up asking if she could stop by and work when she was in town from Ohio and I agreed. Haley brought some of her printed work in from @justajar and I thought it was cool. She described the press she used, and I waxed my first press that was very similar. Later that day Haley told me the owner of @justajar was the same person who long ago loaded that press up from my grandmother’s garage and started his shop with it. All the art Haley showed me that day was printed on that emerald green Chandler and Price!
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You never know how you are going to be the torch bearer for the next person in this life. That’s what I love about letterpress. Each of these presses has a life and they’re usually much longer than the person that currently owns them. We all just keeping them alive for the next person