The Casemaker 750A has been designed to work alongside the company's BCC10 binder to produce one-off and short-run hardback books.

Speaking at the show, product development manager Jan Denies said the machine would fill a gap in the case-making market.

He explained: "There is a lot of equipment out there today, but it isn't very good for the short-run market. It tends to go            to two extremes: you have these very longrun machines, but you can't print one book on them; or it is very

manual - somebody will have five HP Indigos then a room full of people, manually folding and gluing, they're embarrassed to show you."

The £250,000 750A runs at 400 books per hour and can be operated by just one minder.

It processes Unibind's own preglued CasePlano covers. The 750A then covers the case with the printed jacket, liner and glues the pages by applying heat and pressure all in one pass.

Denies said: "The craftsmanship of book manufacturing is being taken away from bookbinders and going to digital printers. They know how to print, but they do not now how to make good covers. We are introducing more automation to enable them to do that."