Kelsey Printer's Guide

This is a relatively concise booklet covering the topic of printing with a small tabletop printing press of the kind sold by The Kelsey Company. Much of the material in it is abridged from the Kelsey Printing Course.

As is the case with the Printing Course, the date of this document is unclear. My present guess is that it was probably developed somewhere from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s. Based on evidence from material acquired with it, it was probably printed in the early 1970s. I believe that it has lapsed into the public domain due to a technical fault in its copyright notice (see the section of fine print at the end of this page).

This particular copy of the Kelsey Printer's Guide belonged originally to the late Charles L. (Charlie) Bush.

I've divided the document up into sections in order to keep the size of each PDF relatively small. If your network connection is fast, you may be able to click on each and read it online via your web browser. However, I would suggest that you download each lesson to your computer (or whatever serves you in place of a real computer) and read them locally in your own environment. For those with a sufficiently fast net connection, here is the entire book in a single PDF (176 Megabytes): kelsey-printers-guide-9ed-complete-0600rgbjpg.pdf

Please note that this booklet documents the processes common a half century or more ago. We've learned things since then, and all of the processes described here should be evaluated in light of current knowledge of safe practices. In particular:

(1) One should never smoke in the printing shop. Smoking provides a path for the transfer of shop chemicals to your lips, and (the dangers of tobacco aside) is one of the few ways that you can poison yourself in the printing studio.

(2) Gasoline has no place in any shop, despite its common use as a solvent in the 20th century. It has a flashpoint near 50 degress below zero and has an extremely high energy content. A neighbor of mine was using gasoline in his home shop once. We knew he was coming back home from the hospital and rehab a year later when they installed the wheelchair lift on his front porch.

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