Working with both Ken Rush and Simon & Schuster, the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum has secured permission to produce a new limited-run hardcover edition of The Seltzer Man. This edition will be printed exclusively for Backerkit backers and supporters of the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.

Every page will faithfully reproduce the original illustrations and text, presented in a beautifully produced hardcover edition with a full-color dust jacket.

This will be a limited printing created specifically for this campaign. Once the campaign ends, there is no guarantee the book will be printed again.

You can buy copies just for yourself, friends, or family. Additional tiers will invite you to donate copies to libraries, acquire signed editions by author/illustrator Ken Rush, and buy exclusive tickets to the book’s reveal event at the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.

Below are a few examples of Ken Rush’s original artwork from the book, shown before the story text was added.

Publishers Weekly printed the following description of the book: 
"A delivery man sees his job in a new light when he takes two young helpers along on his route. After ``schlepping seltzer'' throughout Brooklyn for 40 years, Eli feels ready to retire--``My truck's worn out, and folks don't want to fuss with my old bottles and crates anymore.'' But Beth and her sister are fascinated by his work, and jump at Eli's suggestion that they accompany him on his rounds. The final stop on a busy delivery day is Coney Island, for ``lunch on the boardwalk'' and a ride on the Wonder Wheel. The girls' wide-eyed enthusiasm convinces Eli that he's not quite prepared to park his truck for good. Rush's follow-up to Some Things Never Change , though set in a contemporary period, again harkens to days gone by, melding past and present into a quiet, though accessible package. Thickly applied oil paint provides enough specific touches to suggest a time and place, while some indiscernible facial features and building fronts evoke a universal feeling."

There are five pledge level tiers to choose from:

Are there add-ons?

For you, there are add-ons.

You want shirts, we have shirts. 

You want mugs, we have mugs. 

Each unique item, created exclusively for this campaign, available for a limited time, is based on the Ken Rush's original art for The Seltzer Man. 

We have jigsaw puzzles and coasters. We have magnets for your fridge and Giclee Fine Art prints to hang on your wall. 

On top of all that, you can buy extra tixs to The Seltzer Man book release event, to be held at the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, with Ken Rush. 

By backing this campaign, you’ll help:

Eli Miller may be best remembered through these excerpts from his obituary in The New York Times. You may notice that the article references both Ken Rush’s The Seltzer Man and Seltzertopia, the book by the founding Executive Director of the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.

Long before sparkling water with brand names like Polar, Perrier and La Croix crowded bodega refrigerators and apartment dwellers used household carbonators to bottle bubbling beverages themselves, New Yorkers relied on seltzer men to deliver refreshment in clanking glass bottles.

Eli Miller, one of the last of the old-fashioned seltzer men, covered a route in Brooklyn from 1960 until he retired in 2017. Mr. Miller died on March 12 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 86.

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.

“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.

What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

Gregarious, well read and engaging, Mr. Miller was welcomed by his customers as enthusiastically as the seltzer, and he enjoyed close friendships with many of them.

“I’m the product,” Mr. Miller was quoted as saying in Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink (2018), by Barry Joseph. “It’s not the seltzer. It’s all about Eli.”

Mr. Miller’s longevity in a disappearing business lent him a splash of fame. He was profiled by numerous publications and websites and became the subject of a children’s book, The Seltzer Man (1993), by Ken Rush, a longtime customer.

Below is a video of Eli reading The Seltzer Man:

The Brooklyn Seltzer Museum is new non-profit dedicated to preserving and promoting the effervescent history of seltzer water. We are located in the oldest seltzer works in New York City, a local, family-run business now in its fourth generation. Together, we offer a Museum and Factory Tour that celebrates the manufacturing of seltzer, the science of seltzer, and seltzer as a cultural force in New York City and the world beyond.

We are a unique, quirky museum, both interactive and inspiring, inside an active factory (Brooklyn Seltzer Boys) manufacturing a sustainable local product. Guided tours and exhibits are educational, covering 2,400 years of business and cultural history and STEM content. Groups enjoy tackling the scavenger hunt and wooden puzzle challenges, and spritzing one another with fresh seltzer; activities adaptable for families, team-building, & school groups.

The Museum is a dream realized by co-curators Alex Gomberg (VP of Brooklyn Seltzer Boys) and Barry Joseph (digital experience designer).

Atlas Obscura: "A gem of a museum."
CBS: "Vintage equipment, decades-old bottles and a family carrying on tradition make this a truly one-of-a-kind experience."
Good Day New York: "A piece of New York not to be missed."
An unnamed 4th grader on a field trip: “It was so good I was about to pass out.”

You can learn more about the Museum, book tours, take virtual tours, shop the store and more here.

Books, t-shirts, and merchandise will be shipped in one package. Art prints will be shipped separately. 

Exact shipping costs by region can be hard to predict in advance as prices can fluctuate, especially given the state of tariffs and the world. Final totals will be determined when the items are available for shipping.

March/April: Campaign

May: Orders will be placed with both the book publisher and the merchandise providers

Fall: When the books arrive (which are completely outside our control), you will be sent a form to finalize shipping costs. All items will then be packaged and mailed. Fall is a fair estimate, given our past experience, but is no guarantee (could be sooner, could be later). Once the publisher can commit to a delivery date we will schedule the book release party one month later (to allow for delays on their side) to be held at the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.