The barn sits eleven miles southwest of Lawrence, Kansas, on a gravel road that runs between two fields of soybeans. From the road one cannot see the press. One can see only the barn, which is gray and leaning slightly to the east.

Inside the barn, on a concrete floor that was poured in 1962, sits an iron hand press built in 1824 by R. Hoe and Company of New York.

The press is six feet tall and weighs approximately eleven hundred pounds. It has been in continuous operation since 1825, when it was first installed in a newspaper office in Cincinnati.

It has moved seven times since then. It is now owned and operated by a man named Calvin Doerr. He is sixty-four. He bought the press in 1991, at an auction in Topeka, for thirty-eight hundred dollars.

Doerr was a high school English teacher for twenty-six years. He retired in 2017. He now prints books, full time, on the hand press, at a rate of approximately one book every fourteen months.

I visited him in April. He met me at the barn door wearing a leather apron stained black with ink that had set in over decades.

He showed me the press. He pointed out the date stamped on the iron frame: 1824. He pointed out the small repair, welded at the base of the lever, that had been made in 1893 by a printer in Cleveland.

He pointed out the wear on the platen, the flat metal surface that presses the paper against the type. The wear is a slight dip in the center, worn down by two hundred years of pressure.

"The dip is what we are working with," he said. "The dip is the history of the press. It also means every page is slightly uneven in the middle. I have learned to compensate."

Doerr prints in editions of fifty to one hundred. He prints poetry, mostly. His current project is a selection of poems by Lorine Niedecker, which he expects to complete in the autumn.

“Doerr prints in editions of fifty to one hundred.”

He sets each line of type by hand. He has, in the barn, approximately ninety drawers of metal type, in twelve typefaces and various sizes. He showed me his favorite, a 14-point Caslon Old Face cast in 1958.

He told me it had been in continuous use for sixty-eight years and that the letter e in the lowercase was beginning, just beginning, to wear.

He told me he would not replace it. He told me the worn e was now part of the typeface, the way the dip in the platen was part of the press.

He told me a book printed on the hand press, with this type, on the paper he uses (a cotton paper from a small mill in Vermont), takes him approximately eight months to complete from setting the first line of type to binding the last copy.

He showed me his most recent finished book. It was a selection of essays by William Stafford. It was bound in dark blue cloth. It weighed almost nothing in my hand.

I asked him whether he made a living.

He said he did not. He said the books cost him, in materials and time, more than he could ever charge for them. He sold them at cost, plus shipping, to a list of about three hundred subscribers who had signed up over the years.

He said he lived on his pension. He said he printed because he could not, at this point, imagine not printing.

I asked him what the press had taught him.

He thought about this for a long time. He looked at the press, not at me.

"The press has taught me," he said, "that there are some things you cannot rush. I knew this before I had the press. But I knew it as a sentence. The press has taught me it as a fact."

He told me about a book he had printed in 2011, a selection of poems by W. S. Merwin. He had wanted to finish it before Merwin's eighty-fourth birthday. He had not finished it in time. He had been three months short.

He had sent Merwin the book when it was finished. Merwin had written back, on a postcard, three lines.

Doerr showed me the postcard. It is pinned to a beam above the press. The handwriting is small and careful.

The postcard reads: Dear Mr. Doerr, the book arrived. It is beautiful. The lateness, I think, is part of what makes it beautiful. Thank you. W. S. M.

Doerr pointed at the postcard. He said: "That is the only review I have ever cared about."

I left the barn at five in the afternoon. The light was coming in through the western window. Doerr was setting type for the next page of the Niedecker. He did not look up when I left.

I drove the eleven miles back to Lawrence in the long Kansas evening. The fields were green. The press, I knew, would still be there in the morning. It would still be there for a long time after that.