Commercial Binders Report Making High-Value Connections at On Demand

New England Printer & Publisher, Company Profile
Packing parachutes and delivering wedding cakes
High standards and high technology are the formula for success for Acme Bookbinding
By John Hebert

If points were scored for professional intensity, Paul Parisi would be in the Business Olympics. Parisi is president of Acme Bookbinding, a family-owned Charlestown, Massachusetts-based trade shop and industry icon that specializes in binding any and every kind of book imaginable — as long as the customer wants a quality product.

The company traces its beginnings to 1821 and the J.G. Roberts Company, making Acme Bookbinding the oldest continuously operated book bindery in the world.

Over the years, the company has grown from a one-person basement operation to a manufacturer with a staff of 185 operating in a modern 100,000 square-foot facility that has world-class systems and machinery.

The full-service bindery specializes in manufacturing hardcover and paperback books for major, well-established publishers with rigorous manufacturing requirements for discriminating audiences. The bindery also serves mid-size and smaller clients and even handles orders for individuals. In fact, Acme binds thousands of single copy hardcover books every day, many of which are for private clients. Acme’s hardcover and softcover products can be Smyth sewn or adhesive bound with hotmelt, PUR or PVA.

Its products include case binding and paperback binding, textbook rebinding, and library binding. Through one of its divisions, Acme Bookbinding serves printers, publishers, libraries, government agencies and other businesses throughout the country.

Acme’s newest division, Imaging and Digital Printing, offers facsimile reproduction of out-of-print books and digital printing of short-run books on-demand.

Acme’s recent acquisition, The Harcourt Bindery, specializes in custom leather hand-binding with hand-tooled gold work, gilt edges and a wide selection of handmade marbled papers. Harcourt also offers custom clamshell boxes, slipcases, and repair work. Harcourt, founded in 1900, offers high-end custom work that complements the fine quality of Acme’s highly automated book production capabilities. (See sidebar.)

Packing parachutes on short order
“Our business is packing parachutes and delivering wedding cakes,” says Parisi. “We can’t make mistakes, and we have to deliver the product on time. We face impossible deadlines, all the time. Almost every job we do is rush and every book we make has to be beautiful. And because we do tall books, short books, thin books and thick books, we need equipment that is very flexible and bet-your-first-born-child reliable.”

Acme relies on Kolbus, Muller Martini, and Smyth — German, Swiss, and Italian engineering — for its big, high-speed trade binding production runs. For short run, on-demand, single-book hard cover production, Acme uses Mekatronics, an American company. Acme also has several unique custom built machines such as the world’s only cloth cutting robot, the EZ-Cut which cuts single sheets of book cloth of the right color and size from four carousels with 96 rolls of cloth, to support Acme’s one-off work flow. Says Parisi, “These companies plus a long list of other manufacturers give Acme the ability to produce even the most challenging project with consistent quality, speed and the delicate touch that one would expect only from a hand process.”

Much of the equipment is driven by custom software developed both in-house and with outside companies, and always under the careful supervision of Acme’s seasoned staff of production experts. “We also have a highly dedicated front office staff that supports our clients and keeps all of this just-in-time workflow on track. Just walking through our plant it’s easy to see all the books in process, but it’s very hard to grasp the depth of infrastructure that enables the estimating, materials ordering, scheduling, binding, delivery and invoicing of the thousands of unique orders we process each day.”

Its experience and long history in bookbinding gives Acme a strong perspective on historical trends, as well as a perfect position from which to survey new ones. And its location a few miles from downtown Boston and the area’s world-class educational, financial and medical institutions, a client base that Acme serves, gives Acme a keen view on emerging trends.

Meeting the digital revolution
With the rise of digital printing, Parisi has seen an increase in short run paperback orders, which are not well suited to Acme’s 8,000 book per hour perfect binder. Authors, publishers, museums, art galleries, banks, insurance companies, and many other clients are discovering the availability of high-quality, digitally printed, short-run paperback books. Everybody wants professional-looking books to represent their project and now this service is available. Plus, Parisi notes, there’s growing demand for just-in-time manufacturing of books as they are ordered — one book for one order. In addition to manufacturing one order of many books for a warehouse, Acme now is being asked to produce many orders for individual clients’ purchases.

“It’s clear that the digital printing market will grow rapidly, meaning more and more production will be short-run or on-demand,” Parisi explains. “Today, if someone wants a hundred books they order a hundred. If someone wants a thousand, they order a thousand. And if they want one, they’ll order one.”

That’s where the vast array of highly automated binding and finishing equipment fits right in with Paul Parisi’s business strategy. “Although we’re often thought of as a small library binding operation, we’re actually a large, high-technology business that relies on range of advanced technology to produce quality products on time. And most of our machinery is equipped with every option imaginable, which allows us to cover the enormous range of variables represented by an annual production volume that extends into the millions,” Parisi points out.

A recent acquisition among this sea of equipment is a C.P. Bourg BB3002 Perfect Binder, a totally automated, near-line machine that offers the performance, versatility and quality Acme needs for short-run perfect binding.

The Bourg BB3002 augments and complements Acme’s workhorse perfect binder — a multi-million-dollar, 28-pocket Kolbus Ratiobinder. The Kolbus is a big machine (more than 200 feet long) designed for big jobs and high production speeds of up to 8,000 books per hour — gathering many signatures, binding them, trimming, stacking and delivering perfect finished products. A team of skilled operators runs this amazing combination of integrated machines, producing hard-cover book blocks, sewn paperbacks or perfect bound books made with a two-shot system of cold glue, hot melt or PUR adhesive. Computer-assisted setup enables operators to change from one book to the next with less than 30 minutes of set-up time to turn out the first saleable book.

“Although our Kolbus binder does a beautiful job and is essential for large orders, it’s not practical for short runs of even several hundred books and certainly not for single copies,” Parisi explains. “To meet the digital revolution head-on, we needed a perfect binder that could take jobs from offset or digital workflows and have the books bound and shipped by the time the Kolbus is getting up to speed. Now, with the Bourg machine, we can produce a quality-bound book for this market at a reasonable cost.”

With its long history making short run hard cover books, it made sense for Acme to also have a binder that could handle short run soft covers efficiently. If one could be found, Parisi reasoned, Acme could accept business from new customers whose primary need was short run paperbacks, but who might also have other projects more suited to Acme’s higher volume manufacturing capability. A short-run perfect binder could also enhance sales to long-run customers by allowing a few finished samples of their books in advance of the main order.

In 2006, Paul Parisi began the search for a near-line perfect binder that, quite simply, could do high-end, high quality, short-run books. Fast set-up, high reliability of the equipment and high quality of the finished product were all critical factors, he says.

“We looked at other machines and we brought books with us that we knew would be trouble. And every time, hours later, we didn’t have a single book bound satisfactorily. “Then we went to a Bourg customer location and tried the same books, and every book out was good on the first try. And it wasn’t just that [C.P. Bourg Sales Representative] Bob Kelsey was a better demonstrator. We’ve had the same experience since installing the machine here. Every book we bind on the Bourg is a quality product we’re proud to call an Acme-bound book,” Parisi explains.

Sheer simplicity
In January 2007, Acme installed the BB3002 Binder tied to a Bourg-supplied in-line Challenge CMT-330 three-knife trimmer adjacent to the Kolbus perfect binder on the production floor. The BB3002 allows an operator with a few hours of training and limited mechanical aptitude requirements to set-up just about any perfect bind job within one minute, and start producing books one right after another — even if every book is a different title.

Among its many advances, the BB3002 features an icon-driven operating system displayed on an 11-inch color touchscreen. This operator-friendly interface allows most functions — including milling, in-line side gluing, scoring and suction cover-feeding — to be easily selected from a list of menu options and set digitally.

Another Bourg advance called Symmetrical Cover Registration makes the most of the BB3002 onboard computer technology. As it clamps the book block, the BB3002 automatically measures thickness and calculates the centerline of the cover to fasten the spine perfectly, without fail. Symmetrical Cover Registration also enables binding books of the same size and different thicknesses one after another automatically, without operator intervention.

Acme’s BB3002 offers many other capabilities required for short run perfect binding, such as an automatic jogger that adjusts to paper type and book thickness and programmable milling with up to four notching tools and thickness bypass, and operator programmed automatic side-gluing that eliminates manual adjustments and errors.

And, Parisi adds, it’s fast. The BB3002/CMT-330 combo binds up to 300 books per hour as small as 3.5 x 3.9 inches and up to 12.59 x 15.15 inches to meet its full-rated cover spec of 27.9 x 15.5 inches.

“Another factor in our equipment decisions is expert service,” says Parisi. “With Bourg, I have several service technicians who know the machine well enough that I can phone any of them and say, ‘This is the problem’ and they’ll say, ‘Try this’ and they’re right. But typically, Bourg’s machine has been so simple and trouble-free that we haven’t needed help — which is the ideal.”

After a rare pause Parisi says, “We had a run of 500 books this morning. The job was in and out on the Bourg with no problems. If it’s a run of 10,000 books, we’re not going to put it on the Bourg. But if it’s hundreds or tens — and certainly one — we definitely are going to put it on the Bourg.”

Positioned for the future
Countering the predictions of some, Parisi challenges the notion that books will go out of favor. “It won’t be an iPod only world,” he says, “because display screens just can’t match the beauty and magic of paper-based books where the creativity of the book designer brings a text to life.”

“Books will endure because they are so simple — even the youngest child can enjoy the magic that a book creates. The physical qualities of the printed book call to the reader beckoning them to discover the wonders contained within. The book is a brilliant device that makes it possible for authors and artists to engage readers they will never know with beauty, wisdom, wit and every human emotion. The package, the physical qualities of cloth, paper and ink, links this familiar object to a world that lives only in the reader’s imagination. We’re betting that people won’t give up on beautifully printed and bound books any time soon.”

And given Acme’s continuing success, it’s a bet that Paul Parisi and his customers seem bound to win.

About the author: John Hebert has been involved with the graphic arts industry for 20 years as a writer and principal of Hebert Communications. Contact him at 617-232-1161 or at .