Historic printing press for sale
Owners hope it will see use once more
To the roar of the mechanized world in the late 19th century, the designer William Morris brought the satisfying thwack of handcrafted antiquity.
His monument, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, is a 556-page volume with illustrations by Edward BurneJones. The book was laboriously printed, two pages at a time, from 1894 to 1896 at Morris’ Kelmscott Press in the Hammersmith district of London. Each page is roughly 17 inches by 11 inches. Many are encircled by decorative borders with so much plant life that the pages almost seem aromatic.
To say that the Kelmscott Chaucer is ornate is like saying that a peacock has tail feathers; true enough, but something of an understatement.
“It is intended to be essentially a work of art,” Morris declared. And so it is.
The instrument on which this artwork was composed
“It’s time for someone who will put it back into service.”
PROFESSOR JETHRO K. LIEBERMAN
was the Improved Albion Press No. 6551, a hand press almost seven feet high, weighing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds, and made in 1891 by Hopkinson & Cope in England. The press is to be auctioned on Friday by Christie’s. The estimated price is $100,000 to $150,000.
“It’s time for someone who will put it back into service,” said Professor Jethro K. Lieberman of New York Law School, the author of The Litigious Society, who owns the press with his wife, Jo Shifrin.
Standing this week in the atrium of Christie’s Rockefeller Center gallery, the press — a thing of dark, Dickensian iron musculature — looked like a rough guest who had shown up for tea. The great platen, with its clawlike flanges, was suspended at rest. But a glance at the pistons above made clear how much force that platen could exert on the paper and printing plate below.
J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman, Jethro Lieberman’s parents, were leaders in the private press revival movement in America during the 1950s. They purchased the Albion in 1960 and called it the Kelmscott/Goudy Press, honouring Morris’s shop and Frederic W. Goudy, a celebrated American designer who had bought the press in 1924 and had it shipped to New York.
The Liebermans, who lived in White Plains, N.Y., intended to print with the Albion. But they quickly learned how taxing it was to do so. Though too cumbersome to employ, the press was also too precious to leave behind, so it travelled with the family three times, finally settling in Ardsley, N.Y., in 1997. Like his parents, Jethro Lieberman envisioned returning the Albion to duty. “It seems worthwhile to preserve the old craft by publishing, from time to time, pages that smell of ink and feel the stamp of metal,” he wrote in 1996.
Until recently, the press sat quietly in a downstairs room at his home in Ardsley. When showing first-time guests around, he said, it was his custom to open the door to this room with a bit of a flourish and say, “I don’t know where you keep your press, but this is where we keep ours.”