The £31,000 acquisition complements an earlier investment in a Horizon BQ-270 single-clamp perfect binder installed in 2013, and a Horizon CRF-362 folder creaser purchased in 2015.

Holywell managing director Ben Burrows – great-grandson of the company’s co-founder Harry Burrows – confessed that the decision to spend on the new trimmer was not an easy one, because it is not adding any new service to the operation like the binder did.

But the ability to eliminate tailbacks in the finishing processes swayed the management team.

“We bought the binder and were finishing the books on a Polar guillotine, which is the absolute centrepiece of our production,” said Burrows. “However, with a varied mix of short-run and longer-run work of up to 1,500 it was becoming a bit of a bottleneck.”

The printer looked at a few options for the trimmer but came back to Horizon because of its build quality.  “The perfect binder has been very reliable and is easy to set up and run,” said Burrows.

The trimmer offers automated touchscreen job setups and quick changeovers, and it can store up to 40 different book jobs in its memory.  It operates offline to trim perfect-bound books at speeds of up to 200cph. 

The Holywell team had seen the HT-30 in operation at trade shows and in the showroom at Intelligent Finishing Systems, which supplied the machine.

When Holywell began printing in 1890 it produced work for Oxford University and then Morris Motors. It later became a publishing house for local authors and also printed the Oxford University magazine, Isis.

Today it produces a range of commercial and educational print, mainly saddle-stitched and perfect-bound books but also magazines, marketing materials and other commercial work, on its Sakurai OL 75 SD, Speedmaster SM 52 and Heidelberg MOZP perfector. It also has digital capacity in a Xerox 770.

In the last two years, its workforce has grown from 11 to 16 people and this year it is hoping to top £1m turnover.