TO PARAPHRASE ANOTHER company’s declaration, TJ International’s mission statement might be “Books: it’s what we do.” The Cornish company has been ‘doing books’ for most of the 35 years it has been in Padstow and nothing but books for the 10 or so years since it moved to what is still called the new factory.

Before Cornwall and nothing but books, the company had started life in Camberwell, south London, printing posters and comics as well as books. Binding in those days went to Dorstal Press where Robert Hartnoll was in charge before he retired to Bodmin. It was a brief retirement before Hartnoll started a new bindery business on what had been the local barracks. Because by 1973 TJ needed to move to accommodate growth, a logical step was to go 250 miles to Cornwall, to be close to the binder it used. TJ took its large format Crabtrees and web press to a factory on the hill above the Cornish fishing port and put down its roots.

Gradually the transplanted business took in typesetting and then its own bindery and picked up a name for producing large print books published by parent company Ulverscroft. At that time large print books accounted for 95% of the business. While TJ still produces 100 titles a month in large print format in English and French for distribution around the globe, these account for 12.5% of sales. “The volume has grown, but the rest of the business has grown faster,” says Angus Clark, the Scotsman who has presided over the business for most of the 20 years since joining TJ.

By the mid 1990s the company had outgrown the site and moved most of the operation to a purpose-built site further into the industrial estate. The original factory is now its specialist digital book printing plant.

When five years ago Ulverscroft decided that its money should be invested in the publishing business, not print, Clark was well placed to lead the management buyout joined by Andrew Vosper, operations director. He has been in harness for just as long as the managing director.

Expansion has continued and TJ International now produces some 6 million books a year, earning close to £11 million. When it moved in 1995, sales were £4 million from the production of 3 million books says Clark. Staffing levels have stayed constant: 150 in 1995, 140 now. To get from there to the current position the company has spent £20 million on more automated and more productive equipment. The most recent spend was some £3.5 million on two large format KBA presses and attendant MBO folders, and Agfa Avalon platesetters. The spending and striving for efficiency will not stop: Clark led a team to Drupa with among other things a project to look for the next generation of digital presses. “We were also looking for case making because there has to be a faster way of doing that, and also it hasn’t been suitable for very, very short run work,” he says.

Digital print is currently based on a cut sheet and web fed Océ machines and accounts for 15% of sales. The goal is to take this to 25%, which, as the current trend is to shorter production runs, seems eminently feasible. Digital production is also more profitable, partly because as a print on demand operation it is service-led and partly because the nature of the business takes in and eliminates other costs that a publisher might have – storage for example.

However, where once there was a clear cut off between digital and sheetfed offset, there is now an area of overlap, even with larger format presses. The Rapida 142s are competitive on much shorter runs, though not yet down to the nine copies which the Océs handle. “We have always been short run,” Clark says, “with an average which has come down from 1,700 to 1,200 copies. Now we will do runs of 150 on the litho presses and up to 350 on the digital. When we started with digital there was a very clear break at 200 copies; now there is a big overlap and we choose where to print according to our capacity.”

Between shedding the size 6 Crabtree perfectors and installing the KBAs last year, TJ had been a committed Heidelberg house, having bought and replaced B1 Speedmasters every two years. As Clark led a review of the business, noting that the mix of work had changed, he says: “We realised that B1 wasn’t ideal for us going forwards. We checked with Heidelberg, but their large format machines were two years away and we couldn’t wait for that machine to become available.” The result was the first KBA 142 installed in April last year and the second in December. A Speedmaster has been retained, though it has been overtaken by the new machines. Comparing the new with the old, Clark says: “Both make ready in 12 minutes, both run at 8,000sph in perfecting, but clearly the KBA is twice as productive. We had four Speedmasters and planned to keep two, but that’s not been necessary as the KBAs eat the work. The last Heidelberg will go sometime this year.”

It’s not an absolute expulsion. When the time comes to replace the 142 format machines, Heidelberg will have market experience with its larger format machines and will be a fierce challenger to KBA.

Clark is very much a believer in long-term relationships with suppliers. It committed to Océ early on and continues that relationship. On the prepress side, TJ has always worked with Agfa. Most recently it supplied the large format platesetters needed to feed the presses. It has also provided the Delano production management tool and supplies the process-free plates that are the key to TJ’s environmental stance.

Concern for the environment has in turn been a key part of the company’s strategy and its development. Nothing leaving the factory ends up as landfill and other projects reduce the printer’s environmental impact. Plates, chemistry and what might be termed rubbish of all kinds is recycled. The inks it uses are vegetable oil based and are supplied in 50 kilo containers which can be reused. Incoming electricity passes through a power perfecting unit to even out usage. Payback for this investment, says Clark, is set at two years thanks to cutting energy consumption by 15%.

TJ was quick to espouse the environment for the marketing edge it provides and in the part of the country it is located, the company could scarcely do anything else. After all Surfers Against Sewage, which sprang up as one of the first popular environmental movements, had started in Cornwall in the 1990s. “The environment is big for us,” says Clark. “We ran an internal awareness programme with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and we put all the staff through a one-day course, at the end of which we ask, ‘If there’s one thing you would like to change, what would it be?’

“We pulled these ideas together, set up a committee of volunteers from the shop floor – no manager or director involvement – and put the committee through a one-week course. Two have since qualified to NVQ-4 in environmental management. The result is that we have a very successful environmental committee who drive targets and set objectives for the year.”

In the first 18 months, waste was cut by 95% with a boost to the bottom line through sales of what were perceived as waste materials.

All the core papers that the company uses are either FSC or PEFC certified and from mills with ISO 14001, as the printer is. It looked into going for Emas, but decided at the time that there was no significant difference to ISO 14001. “We’ve also looked at other initiatives and make sure that the materials we use are as environmentally friendly as we can get them,” says Clark.

The company also employed a graduate with an environmental science degree for a 12-month period, providing a slightly different perspective on what was possible. Locally the stance has been successful in raising the printer’s profile, with TJ working with the Eden Project and with the Rick Stein empire in Padstow on a number of environmental projects and committees.

This focus has not protected the company from commercial pressures to continue to improve efficiency, but it has helped foster the sort of environment where the directors can sit down and explain the issues to the staff and the staff will respond. Clark explains: “With the pressure on margins everybody knows we have to look at how we can be more efficient, looking at cutting the number of sheets that minders expect to use in running up for example.

“So we sit down and talk with the guys, saying this is where we are under pressure and that we need to keep making a margin in order to continue to invest.”

Ideas come back and when the idea of moving away from B1 to larger sheets was discussed the response was, “We’ve come from larger sheet sizes to B1: we can go back again. It’s not a problem.”

Staff were involved in assessing whether it would be KBA or Roland which took the order. The fact that other UK book printers were already using KBA was a big factor; but the clinching factor, says Clark, was that the KBA could be operated by one man.

This is part of the changing nature of the print business. When the buyout went through in 2003, the new owners made a five-year plan to check progress against. Every 18 months there has been a check against this. “We are starting now to look beyond that plan at what shape the business is going to be and what it should be doing differently over the next five years, though in reality it’s difficult to see beyond a three-year horizon with any confidence,” he explains. A team of managers is being put in place ready to run the operation when the lead directors decide to step aside.

One development is clearly an expansion of client services: TJ International is the only UK book printer with Agfa’s Delano customer service portal; and while not all its customers are using the web tool, a growing number are. The company’s client services team is increasingly responsible for prepress work, handling impositions and plate making once the job is signed off, and juggling the loading between litho and digital production, feeding information back to customers about job progress. “We would like customers to come into the system and find this out for themselves, to check that the job is going to be delivered on the day that we say it will. And provided they can come in before we have decided how we will print the job, they can set many of the parameters themselves.

“We want publishers to do as much of the administration behind the scenes as possible. This is not just sending us an email, but working so that we don’t have to re-key the data with the risk of errors. And quite a lot are now starting to do this. It makes it easy to deal with us, and it builds our internal documentation and job tickets through delivery notes and invoices.”

This is all JDF-enabled with I-teba as the MIS supplier linking to prepress, press and bindery. “JDF is not quite there as yet: it’s nearly there and we can get information going one way to the presses and bindery, but information only comes back from some of it,” he says. That is clearly going to improve in the next period.

After printing, TJ is increasingly taking on distribution tasks, posting direct to the customer rather than delivering to huge warehouses. It is also promoting the idea of print on demand with frequent reprints if needed, rather than taking a large number and having to store them. Some customers are more inclined to accept change than others. “We deal with a lot of international book publishers, many of whom haven’t understood the idea of digital book production yet,” he says. “Too many are still fixated by unit cost of printing a book, which is the wrong focus when costs of distribution are so high.”

There is a partnership with a US book printer to jointly produce titles for a publisher so that a book can be available simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic, so that costs of shipping from one continent to the other disappear, and so that the six-week gap in publishing disappears.

What will not disappear is the book itself. There is some encroachment from electronic books and online publication. It’s a gradual move with plenty of potential still from digitally printing books, Clark reckons. Nor is he overly concerned that work will vanish to China. TJ’s customer service culture is perhaps even more ingrained than its environmental ethos, the company taking justifiable pride in this aspect of its business – something that means that it has become sole supplier to certain institutions, where the printer’s flexibility and speed of response is appreciated. Many academic authors, for example, will be late completing a book needed for the course beginning in the new term. There just isn’t the time to send these jobs to China, he says.

TJ is happy with this. The service the company provides both at the front end and the back end help protect the print and binding in the middle. It means also that Clark is not quite right saying “Books: it’s what we do.” TJ International does far more than that.