In 1958, Kavanagh, now living permanently in New York, built his own printing press from scraps of wood and metal collected from construction sites near his apartment on East 29th Street.
He wrote, printed and published a series of plays based on the lives of several Catholic saints.
In 1960, he hand-printed a synopsis of the John Quinn letters, then held exclusively by the New York Public Library.
After the death of Patrick Kavanagh in 1967, Peter Kavanagh ended his career as a Professor of Modern Poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, and began publishing a series of books on the poet's life: He published several other books including a Dictionary of Irish Mythology, several plays including The Dancing Flame: A Documentary Drama of the Poet in Society (1981); and his own autobiography in two parts, Beyond Affection (1977) and Piling Up the Ricks (1989).
The archive is housed in a special collections room at University College Dublin, and the hand press is on loan to the Patrick Kavanagh Literary Resource Centre, Inniskeen.