Toy Printing Press
07.24.08 By Derek DahlsadI’m usually a stingy buyer; price has a heavy weight when deciding whether I should pick an item up. Sure, it results in me getting a lot of junk because it’s cheap, but it’s my junk, and I wouldn’t have bought it unless it was cool. Then there’s items like this one, where I see it from across the way, make my beeline to it, and hold on to it until I reach the checkout. This, below, is a toy printing press.
I’ve got a soft spot for books, and printed material in general. I can tell a letterpress product versus a lithograph (note: the flyers in the hem box are, surprisingly, lithographic), and I’ve got boxes of letterpress blocks in my basement. The only thing is, I had yet to own a printing press. Full-sized presses are rather spendy, so, for now, I’ll have to stick with my toy printing press.
If it weren’t for toy printing presses, The Simpsons’ Springfield would never know that Todd Flanders smells, although later in the same episode the toy printing press is used to send an important message. For being a relatively functional manufacturing piece, it’s akin to a masculine Easy-Bake Oven; a symbol of future drudgery and industrial servitude, but in childhood it’s “Playing Daddy At Work”. Thousands of budding news editors released special editions of local news — so enormously local as to encompass the livingroom, kitchen, and the part of the back yard where the little sister and her friends are playing. There’s no doubt that the drive to own a tiny printing press springs from the same place that blogging does; however, writers had toy typewriters — the kid with a printing press is another entity altogether. I may be reading into it a bit, but as a freelance writer and blogger who typesets books from time to time, I think the subject may strike me a bit deep.
My new printing press was made by Superior Marking Company (SMECo), of Chicago, sometime in the 1950s. Superior was known for manufacturing rubber stamps and other commercial marking equipment, but they also produced a number of toy rummer stamp kits, with the printing presses at the higher end of the toy line. SMECo produced several sizes of presses, but all worked on pretty much the same mechanical process. The large barrel in the center has rows of metal clips, into which custom rubber ‘cuts’ are 
inserted. the barrel is about seven inches around, setting the maximum length of the printed page. My press, unfortunately, has lost all but the top three inches of text and clips, which limits what can be printed, unless I track down replacements. A slip of paper about three inches wide is inserted into the front of the press, and the crank is turned. This process is actually simple and ingenious; as the barrel rolls, it turns an ‘inker’ roller to place a layer of ink on the raised letters, and when it reaches the lowest point it engages a rotating platen underneath that forces the paper against the raised letters, producing text. Once the letters are set, a little press like this could operate constantly until it ran out of ink or wore down the raised rubber surfaces. While mine (see also, also) has very simple text, other examples online show a wide variety of possible fonts, headers, and layout possible with a little press like these.
Superior wasn’t the only manufacturer of little printing presses. The designs varied from simple rotary presses like mine to miniaturized moving platen presses that operated like their full-sized commercial counterparts. Superior, it seems, was the most prolific of the toy printing press companies, although others have tried their hand at it over time, from Fisher Price in the 60s to Crayola in the 21st century. While this wasn’t a common toy, tin printers like mine show up quite often on eBay and other online stores at reasonable prices.
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Article Tags: printing press, toys================
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July 28th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Wow! In 1978 I fell ill for a while. During my confinement, I read the Constitution. When I got better I wanted to start printing up flyers and such to state my views. In a burst of 1st amendment zeal, I picked up my Johnson Smith catalog and ordered this very printing press. How well I remember the little rubber letters and the tweezers to use in order to line them up. I did that, inked up the device and rolled out a few postcard size diatribes. And now cut to 1999 when my wife and I acquired a newspaper. The paper is still running and is quite influential here in NYC. And it all started with the Superior Printing Press. Thanks for the memories!