Case Studies

Forward Press » Package - Forward Press

Forward Press of Peterborough, which prints more poetry than any other publishing house in the UK, has purchased a variety of equipment from Morgana to finish out from its NexPress and Oce print engines.

Forward Press was founded 17 years ago by m.d. Ian Walton – himself a poet and a former teacher of creative writing – who recognised that there were thousands of people who wrote poetry but were frustrated by the impossibility of getting their work published through conventional channels. Starting with a Multilith 1250 operated from his garage and graduating to a battery of Riso duplicators, Ian’s company now boasts 3 Kodak NexPress 2100s and 2 Oce 6250s, each capable of turning out a book every 30 seconds.

Although still publishing work for individual customers, the growth of Forward Press into a company turning over £5 million plus, has been based on another idea of Ian Walton’s – publishing verse written by school children and then gathered into books for different areas and age groups for which there has proved to be a huge demand from parents. Working with 23,000 primary and 8,500 secondary schools, as well as 23,000 after-school clubs, and having diversified into competitions and many other classroom activities, Forward Press now employs 90 people and turns out tens of thousands of publications each year.

“Runs lengths vary enormously” observes Ian Walton “and for all the shorter run books we rely on Morgana equipment for our finishing requirements.” The Morgana kit at Forward Press includes a KB 2000 perfect binder, a DocuFold folder, a Uchida collator and a recently purchase EBA 551 guillotine and an AutoCreaser 33. “For our work, the most important criteria for finishing equipment is fast set-up and ease of use”, says Ian. “We operate in a real print-on-demand situation, with work ordered, printed and delivered in a two-day cycle – we couldn’t do this with machines that needed high levels of operator skill or were slow to change from one job to the next.”

For further details please contact John Clason, Morgana Systems 01908 608888 or jclason@morgana.co.uk

Or Ian Walton, Forward Press 01733 890099 or ianwalton@gmail.com

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