The circa £9,000 machine was installed last month at the print franchise’s London premises by supplier Ashgate.

Kall Kwik City print room manager Simon Rumball and his son George, managing director, decided on the model after seeing it in action at both Ricoh’s London demo facility in Bishopsgate and the Print Show in Birmingham earlier this year.

The Sprint, which is designed to work with both digital and litho output, eliminates the need to manually finish booklets, as Kall Kwik City previously did. A collated set of up to 25 sheets plus card cover is fed into the machine and a photocell starts the bookletmaking cycle, leaving the operator free to load the next set.

The set is jogged from both sides, stitched, folded and front-edged trimmed as desired. Kall Kwik City chose a TR2 on-line front-edge trimmer.

The manually fed machine can produce up to 1,500 books per hour and sheet sizes between A5 and SRA3. It takes 44/6mm and 44/8mm heavy duty gauge staples.

Simon Rumball said: “What took five hours [manually] now takes 20 minutes.

“Sometimes a bookletmaking job arrives in the morning and is required by 4.30pm the same day. This was always a challenge, but no longer.

“This compact, good value machine has certainly made a huge difference in getting booklets out of the door more quickly and meeting customers’ urgent demands. We now have the facility to take on more of this kind of work.”

Kall Kwik was established in 1978 and currently has 43 branches across the UK.