The London-headquartered company opened the new facility, which has enabled it to produce short-run, digitally printed books in-house, in the summer.

The new device, which will join the firm’s existing Ricoh Pro 8100SE and a Pro C5100S, will be installed this week.

“At the moment we can’t print quickly enough,” said print manager Wesley Urban.

“With two printers we can print double what we’ve been doing. There are also sometimes jobs that can take 10 to 14 hours to print so we can now leave a job like that running and do all the smaller jobs on the other printer.”

Since the printing arm was launched a few months ago, the firm has also installed a Perfecta guillotine, a Matrix laminator, a Horizon BQ270 perfect binder, a Fastbind Casematic H46Pro casemaker, a Fastbind Elite XT hotmelt binder and a Canon iPF8400S large-format printer for oversize covers.

Around £150,000 has so far been invested into launching the five-staff printing facility and buying all of the new equipment.

“By bringing the printing and finishing in-house we have total control of a job from design to finish. This is very important because our production standards are very high. Added to this, we have strict timelines and have been let down on occasions,” said Urban.

He added the company can now handle runs of one to around 400 in-house, though it has recently completed a run of 1,000 150pp books. Generally, though, it will continue to outsource longer runs to printers in the UK and overseas.

“The last few months have been crazy, it’s the busiest they’ve ever been,” said Urban.

“When I started I was told I was going to be doing about 2,000 books and 500 hardbacks a month and I’m doing about 10,000.”

Austin Macauley Publishers was founded in 2006 and recently opened new offices on Wall Street, New York to expand on its international success.