Cambridge Printers founders Nicholas Russell and Graham Cunnold, both 74, agreed to retire earlier this year and asked the BPIF to point them in the direction of local firms that would be interested in taking on its assets, of which four got in touch. Cambridge Printers will officially stop trading from today (16 June).
Russell said: “We talked to the other three but decided in the end that St Ives were the best people to take over.
“We were there on Wednesday taking out the last bits of of customer stock from the Cambridge Printers factory and they were in raptures over the machinery they had bought and had masses of stuff coming in from our customers.”
St Ives Quickprint, which is headed up by managing director Chris Bass, has taken from Cambridge Printers a Multilith press with envelope feeder, a hand-operated perfect-binding line, a bookletmaker, an MBO folder and an Epson wide-format printer, which will allow it to bring wide-format work in-house. It has also taken on one member of Cambridge Printers' staff in its pre-press department, bringing its staff total up to five.
Cambridge Printers' four other members of staff chose a redundancy package over moving to St Ives, which is located around 15 miles away. Cambridge Printers' other assets include two Canon Océ digital printers, a Heidelberg GTO, Original Heidelberg Platen and a Heidelberg Quickmaster D1 Plus four-colour DI press. The kit is being sold by W&H Peacock in an online auction next week.
Along with the newly acquired kit, St Ives also runs three Ryobi litho presses, one two-colour and two single-colours, a Wohlenberg guillotine, a bookletmaker, and various other bits of finishing equipment. It produces a range of commercial work, along with posters and banners.
“Their premises are rammed with kit now,” added Russell.
Cambridge Printers was formed in 2005 via a merger between Russell’s business Larman Printers, which he founded in 1989, and Cunnold’s business Copy Colour. It produced a range of commercial print, from business cards, to seed packets, through to exhibition work.
Russell said he oversaw many developments in a career that spanned six decades.
He said: “I came to an industry in the 1950s that Caxton would have recognised, with a university printing house that had 872 available languages, a lot of which were still done by hand through the stick.
“It has changed dramatically from letterpress to litho to various forms of digital and now moving to high-speed inkjet, so in my working lifetime I have seen everything and wonder what the thing will be after high-speed inkjet.”
