Kelsey Tabletop Press with a Foot Treadle?
Hello,
Sometimes, mostly out of boredom, I will check ebay for there current letterpress stock (which usually is just way overpriced). I recently came upon this which made me look twice. It looks if someone had hooked up a foot treadle to a 5 x 8 Kelsey tabletop Press.
I wouldn’t advise this but I thought it was interesting and worth a share.
There are more pictures on ebay with a nice $3,000 price tag for the press.
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Thanks for the laugh! Rigging that foot treadle to a 5” x 8” Kelsey seems like trying to put a Rolls Royce radiator on a Volkswagen Beetle! Reading the bio of the original owner, it is possibly stuff like this that perpetuates the term “Mad scientist.”
Seeing where it is coming from, I had previously pronounced the location as L-off-lin, Nevada. It now seems like it could also be pronounced Laugh-lin, Nevada!
I hope that the former owner’s personal provenance merits the price, because the press itself sure doesn’t.
Rube Goldberg would be proud.
That is not the first automatic attachment I have seen on a Kelsey. James Weygand at the Press of the Indiana Kid had one that was similar - if not the same. I recall that it shut alarmingly quickly and would have posed a hazard to almost anyone trying to feed sheets into it. Another example of trying to make the better mousetrap (and not succeeding). I’m curious if anyone knows if Kelsey actively sold attachments like this?
That particular press, or one just like it, has been knocking around for several months now. I’m not an expert or anything, but it seems a bit overpriced and under-practical.
The description that I read of it some time back seems to indicate that it is not being sold as a working press as much as it is being sold as a cultural icon, due to it’s association with someone of importance. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the name of the individual who built it. Maybe I just don’t “get it.”…. like modern art.