1855 RUGGLES ROTARY JOB PRESS
Stephen Ruggles was one of the first inventors the platen press and the Ruggles Rotary Job Press is a very rare example of his early creations. Only five or six of these presses remain in existence. It was named the “job press” because printed most of the jobs in the shop. Large scale printing projects, like the town newspaper, would have been printed on a hand press or cylinder press while a job press printed all the smaller items like handbills, posters, and stationary. These smaller jobs were done between printings of the weekly or daily newspaper to fulfill all of towns needs for printed material.
This early platen press has a flat platen, like its successor the Gordon Press, but the “rotary” part of the name is what makes it unique. In more modern platen presses, the ink rollers travel up and down, picking up ink from the disk at the top and travelling down to coat the forme in ink. In the case of the Ruggles Rotary Job Press, the rollers travel in a 360-degree circle around a metal cylinder. The cylinder is fixed in place while printing and can be unlatched to secure the chase. Most platen presses require the printer to put the paper into the press and pull it out after printing. In the case of the Ruggles, all the printer had to do was put the paper in, then push a lever to drop your printed product into a box below. Another interesting facet of the Ruggles press was that the box the press was shipped in was used as the stand for the press once it arrived in the print shop.
The Museum acquired this press from a publisher named Dan Barnett who was living in the small town of Jackson, California. Barnett worked for the Jackson newspaper the Amador Ledger Dispatch from 1965 to 1980, when he sold the newspaper to the Sacramento Bee. This Ruggles press had been part of the Dispatch since 1863 and Barnett took it with him when he sold the paper. Barnett donated this press to the Museum in 1995.
