Finishing & Screen Printing
La Pieve, Villa Verucchio: “During the Demos at the Bookbinding Academy We Lost our Fear of Perfect Binding”
Tuesday 26. March 2013 - La Pieve Poligrafica Editore Villa Verucchio s.r.l, located in Villa Verucchio near the Italian seaside resort of Rimini, is now producing softcover products in-house using a Pantera perfect binder from Muller Martini.
Even before, La Pieve performed almost all production steps in-house, from pre-press and printing to folding and wire stitching (using a 335 saddle stitcher from Muller Martini). The family business, which has 18 employees working in two shifts, only had the perfect binding of books, magazines and brochures done by a partner until a few months ago. According to Giuseppe Pedrosi, who, alongside his brother Filippo and sister Sabina, runs the business founded by his father Silvano in 1974, there were three main reasons for closing this last in-house gap in March: “We want to have the entire value-added chain in our own company and have better control of deadlines and quality”.
Fears Put Aside
However, La Pieve did not make the decision lightly. “We were wary of entering this new market segment with our own production system,” Pedrosi freely admits. La Pieve’s decision to enter perfect binding and to do so with the Pantera from Muller Martini owes a great deal to the visit that Pedrosis made to the Muller Martini Bookbinding Academy in Felben, Switzerland. “The large machine line-up there reassured me that we can count on Muller Martini as an experienced partner also in perfect binding. The excellent demos using the Pantera gave us the final push to invest in the machine. During the tests, we became familiar with the simple operation of the Pantera and entirely lost our fear of perfect binding,” says Pedrosi.
The company’s experiences after commissioning the new perfect binding line with a 16-station gathering machine, criss-cross delivery, a VPN/PUR nozzle, an Esprit three-knife trimmer and a Uno compensating stacker confirmed the positive impressions from the demo center. Following a one-week training course in Felben, the two Pantera machine operators had such a good grasp of the machine that “changeover times exceeded our expectations”, says Pedrosi.
The innovative company, whose three sheet-fed offset printing presses with between four and ten colors are also state-of-the-art, is now able to receive PDFs from customers in the morning and deliver the finished books, magazines and brochures in the evening.
Book Spines from 1.0 mm to 5.1 cm
La Pieve’s print runs are mostly between 1,000 and 5,000 copies. Ninety percent of those are produced for customers from all across Italy, several of which have been working together with La Pieve for years. La Pieve prints the remaining 10 percent of products (mainly manuals for companies and the public administration, as well as street directories) for its own publishing company and sells them via its own web portal.
The company specializes in colored art books, as well as very thick (up to 5.0 centimeters) and very thin books with a spine of just one millimeter, which is even below the official machine specification of the Pantera.
Perfect binding is performed solely using the PUR procedure. “The VPN nozzle is very user-friendly and contributes significantly to our high productivity,” says Pedrosi. “That’s particularly important to us because we’re new to perfect binding.”
The magazines, brochures, comics and books with sizes from 10 x 12 to 30 x 30 are frequently given flaps, for which La Pieve runs them through the Pantera twice.