This may seem like an odd post for this blog, but it would fall under my family's history.
In the 1940s, my grandfather's sister started a business with her husband, a book bindery which did the binding and finishing work. In the early 1950s, the founders approached my grandfather, who had retired from the grocery store business, to become a partner in the business. It wasn't long before the sister came to my grandfather offering to sellout because they wanted to move to California. That's how my family got into the book business.
Under my grandfather's leadership, the company thrived, and in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a new building was built to house the business -- the building was connected to new buildings being built for two important customers, a publisher and a printer. Both of my grandfather's sons went to work at the bindery and contributed to its success. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, my grandfather passed the business into the hands of his sons and retired.
I went to work at the family business in 1992 working in the office doing billing and other clerical work. I didn't make much money, I think I started at $5.50 an hour, even as workers in the shop started at $6:50. As it was explained to me, they could bring anyone in off the street and train them to do my job; additionally, they could not treat me differently as a family member from the rest of the employees. At work I referred to my father and my uncle by their first names so as to no alienate other employees.
Early on in my time at the bindery we experienced a bit of a recession -- even as the nation and other industries did not. What happened was the closure of a paper mill and this caused a ripple in the book industry as printers and binders passed on increased paper costs to their customers -- we passed it to the printer, who passed it to the publisher. The publishers did not have the flexibility to pass on costs to consumers as cover prices are basically set; as a result, publishers published fewer books. Because fewer books were published, printers had less printing work, and we had less binding and finishing work. A classic economic tale. Eventually, paper supplies returned to normal, and the book recession ended.
For the first several years, I was just an employee, though a family member. I was not treated differently, though I did eventually get a raise to $6.50. Then, in the latter part of the decade, my brothers, cousins and I were allowed to become more involved in decision making for the business. Now I got to wear a management hat on occasion. The first major decision we made was to buy a new, state of the art binder.
A binder is a machine which brings together printed and folded sections together and puts glue on the binding side -- it also puts a cover on in the case of soft cover books, an additional machine is required to put covers on hardback books. The older machines required employees to place sections in different "pockets" -- stacking them in a sort of vertical shoot -- usually a handful at a time. The new binder allowed an employee to load bundles of sections on a feeder tray into the pockets. The new machine was also lightning fast compared to the older machines -- I compared the difference to an A-6 Intruder and an F-22 Raptor. It required only one employee to man the feeder trays, as opposed to three or four on the pockets; however, more employees were needed at the other end to handle and box the finished product.
Later, when the business began to experience some trouble, I was moved out of the office to work in the shop. I worked on both the older machines as well as the new one, as well on folders and bundlers. Some new printing machines, called web presses, could fold the sections as they came off the machine, so many jobs came from the printer already folded. But other jobs, printed on older presses, came as flat sheets; these were first folded and then bundled.
On the bundler, I opened and closed a vice via compressed air; I opened, placed a board (usually cardboard) on the right side and then started gathering and placing folded sections by the handful and I was required to continually open and close the vice. When I had a certain amount of sections, I placed another board on the left side, closed the vice and tied a string around the bundle to hold it together.
I really did not like this machine as I figured it was only a matter of time before I got my hand caught -- I had to have my left hand on the last section I just put in and pull it out almost at the last second. I was right as on my last bundle my hand was caught, it hurt like you wouldn't believe, but fortunately nothing was broken. That would turn out to be my last day at the bindery, but I'm getting ahead of the story.
The bundles are then moved to a binder where the string or plastic bind -- if it came from the printer -- is removed. On the older machines a employee would be responsible for two or three pockets. I would take a handful of one section and put it n the first pocket, then of the second for the second pocket, then the third, and repeat. You had to keep track and not put the wrong section in the wrong bundle, but if you did you could hit a stop button and stop the machine. On the hot new binder, as noted, I put the bundles in the feeder trays before removing the boards and band. Again, I would start with the first section of feeder and work my way through to the last, then repeat.
After a few years of doing billing and other clerical functions, I was tasked with doing the data entry for a new database of job estimates and when I completed that, I was trained to do estimates. The printer would fax over a sheet with specifications for a book and I would return an estimate based on a price list.
A book has a binding side, the spine, and three sides that are the edges of the pages. If you hold a book so that you can see the top or bottom edge -- this sometimes can work with the edge opposite of the binding side -- you should be able to see that the pages are divided into sections, this is probably easier to see on a hardback book. In addition to paper type, book size and cover type there was also the number and type of sections that would determine the price per 500, 1000, 2000 or more. Sections came primarily in 32s, 16s and 8s (32 pages per section, etc.) and rarely in 48s, 4s or 2s (48s came from web presses sometimes).
In late 1998 or early 1999, we learned that our largest customer was up for sale. We were concerned that a new buyer might put in his own binding and finishing equipment and would no longer need us. This brings us to how a family business started in the 1940s failed in the first decade of the 21st century.
In 1984, a paper-based time management system called the Franklin Planner was introduced. This planner would have a significant impact on my family's business, not as a tool used for management, but for other reasons. The Franklin Planner was designed and produced by a company that at some point became known as Franklin Quest. At some point in the mid-1990s, Franklin, in an effort to control its paper supplies purchased a company called Publishers Press.
Publishers Press, founded around the same time as Mountain States Bindery, occupied a building connected to the bindery by a common loading dock, and, as the biggest printer in the intermountain area, was our biggest customer. A publishing company called Bookcraft occupied a connecting building between Publishers and the bindery. Not long after Franklin bought Publishers Press, Bookcraft built a new building down the street and moved, and TriCox, a limited partnership of my grandfather, uncle and father, which owned the bindery, bought the Bookcraft building. At first we tried to lease the building but were unsuccessful. Eventually we used the building as additional storage space.
Getting back to Franklin's purchase of Publishers Press, the planner company divided printing company into two divisions, the planner division and the commercial division. Franklin, not surprisingly, was a little bit more concerned with the planner division and the commercial division experienced some neglect.
In 1997, Franklin acquired the Covey Leadership Center, formed in 1985 by The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) author Stephen R. Covey, and Franklin Quest became Franklin Covey. Just a couple of years after the merger, Franklin decided to sell the commercial division of Publishers Press. At Mountain States Bindery, we did not view this as good news.
The thing we most feared was that the new owner of the commercial division would buy his own binding and finishing equipment, thus causing us to lose most or all of the business of our biggest customer. There were a good number of smaller printers in the Salt Lake Valley and intermountain west, but collectively they could not match the output of Publishers Press.
We had several meetings about what to do and decided to make an offer to buy the commercial division. We were outbid by at least two other buyers, so it was not looking good for us. Then a reprieve, the sale to the top bidder fell through and there was a second round of bidding. Alas, we came up short a second time, and once again it looked like our goose was cooked. But, then, another unlikely reprieve as the second buyer was unable to close the deal. On our third chance the opportunity to buy the commercial division of Publishers Press fell to us, if only by default.
Now we had more meetings, because the more we looked at the books for the commercial division, we saw things we didn't like. Perhaps the other two buyers had backed out because they decided the commercial division was too much of a risk. Franklin's neglect of the commercial division had been worse than first thought. To save Publishers Press would require a heroic effort, with little margin for error. We almost balked at the prospect, but again the possibility of another buyer putting in his own binding equipment was unpalatable.
I can't speak for anyone else, I can tell you only what I was thinking. I wanted us to buy Publishers Press because I thought it would give me greater opportunities to advance in the family business. I was, at the time, the youngest of the third generation working for the family business -- my father was the youngest of my grandfather's two sons -- and I didn't have a college degree.
I was now making ten dollars an hour, which even in 2000 did not seem to be enough to raise a family on, even in a state with a comparatively low cost of living. I really thought buying Publishers Press -- the commercial division -- would be the best thing for me. I prayed for it to happen. If they had asked me, I would have put my home up, I believed in it that strongly.
Our purchase of the commercial division of Publishers Press went through during the first half of 2000. It was a leveraged buyout, meaning the loan was borrowed against the assets of the commercial division. Because the bindery was smaller than the printer, we could not have done it any other way. It was actually the limited partnership of my grandfather, uncle and father, that purchased the commercial division and Mountain States Bindery and Publishers Press remained separate entities.
In the summer of 2000, I moved over to the accounts payable department of Publishers Press to handle supplier invoices. I kept the invoices filed and entered them in the computer system. As a small company, the bindery could not compete on price, so we competed on quality, and had a reputation for quality, not just across the United States, but in certain places around the world. In a similar fashion, as an employee, I competed on accuracy rather than speed. We had a saying at the bindery, "Be safe, be accurate, be fast, and when you've mastered those three, be even faster."
Everything seemed to start well as we took over the printing company, and the rush season was very good for us. But then someone made a mistake. I only heard a rumor that someone in the printing shop made a million dollar mistake. Whatever happened it led to the banning of radios in the shop and in the office. In 2001 there were signs of an economic slow down, and then some fanatics drove some airplanes into some buildings. Whether we could have made it through after the big mistake, I don't know, but after 9/11 we were finished. We let the owners of our loan know that we were unable to make the payments and the process of foreclosure began.
In December 2001, I was moved into the bindery shop. While the lenders were to take possession of the printing company's assets, that apparently did not include the negatives of past printing jobs. These negatives were as big as the printed sheets that came off the presses -- before being folded -- and were kept in boxes about the same size. Because of their size, shape and weight, they were a pain to move, and I moved a lot of them from storage in the Publishers Press building to the Bookcraft building. As we would no longer have a printing company, I doubt we ever got any value out of those negatives.
I also moved boxes and boxes of books that had been printed during the recent history of Publishers Press -- I managed to keep several World War II rated books for myself. Most of these books had also been bound by Mountain States Bindery.
Sometime in January or February of 2002, Publishers Press closed its doors for the last time. The lender took possession of the building, the machines and paper. There were quite a few people working for Mountain States Bindery who began looking for new jobs -- and I was one of them.
Without Publishers Press, it was doubtful that we could find enough work to keep Mountain States Bindery alive. The family business was dying, and the worst place to witness this long drawn out expiration, in my opinion, was in the shop. Things usually slow down after the beginning of the new year, but this winter was even slower. There were days when the only work we had was to clean.
Working in the shop was a valuable experience, but I hated almost every minute of it. When I got my hand caught in the bundler, as I mentioned above, I reached the breaking point. I walked off the shop floor and never returned.
Even after my departure, life at the bindery went on. The end was dragged out over two, possibly even three years, as we sold off machines to keep the business alive. Business would have been hard enough without our biggest customer -- had another buyer succeeded in closing their purchase and had put in binding equipment -- but when we bought Publishers Press, all the smaller printers sent their business to the one or two small binders that existed. When Publishers Press failed, the smaller printers did not send much, if any business our way. So it was only a matter of time before Mountain States Bindery would have to close. There were rare occasions where I had reason to visit the bindery, and the saddest day was when I learned we had sold that hot, new, state of the art binder.
There were many people who told my uncle and father that they should just declare bankruptcy and walk away. But they had employees who had worked for them for years, who had been loyal. For the sake of those employees they held on as long as they could. But as you sell off all your machines, you decrease your production capacity, which makes it harder to pay the bills.
The death of the bindery was inevitable. When the end came, my cousins tried to make a go of it on their own with the last of our machines and equipment, but that quickly went nowhere. A few years after the business closed, we sold the buildings that we still owned. I go by those buildings at least once a year because the accounting firm that does my taxes is right across the street. The new owners of the building changed the facade so that it looks nothing like it did when I worked there.
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