Monthly Archives: December 2011

E for execrable when it comes to Christmas cards

Something happened last night that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside and full of seasonal cheer. Unusually for this time of year it didn’t involve a bottle of Lidl’s finest Gluhwein.

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Sterling work

How fantastic for
our very own Sterling Press to have the first top-speed perfecting version of Heidelberg’s new
Speedmaster XL 105 in the world.

That’s quite a
coup for the Kettering
crew, I think. Not so long ago new kit like this would always be installed at companies
not too far away from the factory that made it.

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Contract printing conundrum

It was
super-interesting to visit Bedfordshire the other week to see “Westferry
Luton”, Richard Desmond’s new newspaper printing plant.
One of the interesting
things being the name, of course.

I hadn’t realised
the Westferry name would live on beyond the docklands location era. That’s
quite a nice touch, I think. There’s something rather marvellous about a brand
new print site where everything has been set up just so from a blank sheet of
paper and all the kit is shiny and new. Westferry Luton is looking like a very
slick setup. And as chief executive David Broadhurst points out, once the new KBA
Commanders are fully on-stream with full-colour output, they’re bound to want
the same colour facilities at the group’s northern newspaper print hub in
Preston too, so it’s easy to envisage phase two going ahead as planned. And plans to add driers to the Luton presses to produce magazine-quality colour are super-intriguing too.

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Manroland machinations

 

Speculation surrounding what will happen next at
Manroland is throwing up some mind-boggling prospects.

I read one report that mooted a solution involving a
mega-merger between Manroland, Heidelberg and KBA to make some sort of ultimate
behemoth in German printing equipment manufacturing. Can you even begin to
imagine how that could pan out? No, nor can I.

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Catalogue catalogue

The other day I made the mistake of answering truthfully
when someone asked me what I’d done over the weekend. “Yesterday I sorted my
Christmas catalogues into size order,”
I replied excitedly, in one of those conversation
killing, must-remember-to-engage-brain-before-opening-mouth-next-time moments.

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Migration madness at Royal Mail

Imagine, if you will, that you run a large
organisation that is busy with routine tasks every day (although not as busy as
you used to be). When it comes to the run-up to Christmas, though, you are guaranteed
to be REALLY busy. Really. Busy. Busy10 if you like.

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