Aylesbury-based Pelican Print has installed a Morgana PowerSquare 224 bookletmaker for the production of square-back books of up to 224 pages.

The company operates digital and litho equipment, with the Morgana machine being used alongside the former technology. Morgana describes it as ‘perfect for the binding of high pagination or heavier stock publications,’ though the company stresses it is equally at home with smaller formats. It also enables users to print onto the spine, giving an appearance similar to that of perfect-bound books.

Gary Pople, Pelican’s head of digital services, commented, ‘One of our major clients has added a number of sites to its expanding business. As a result, the number of publications that they are ordering has grown significantly. This has meant that we had to decide how we were going to best solve the increase of work in the post-press area of our digital workflow.

‘We had started to review our digital finishing capabilities prior to the pandemic, as we had been shuttling work from our digital production factory over to our litho building on the other side of Aylesbury. That then often meant interrupting a longer run on our Muller Martini stitching line in order to produce a short run job. Higher pagination work might have involved sending the work out to a trade finisher for perfect binding.’

Mr Pople first came across the SquareBack 224, which can handle stocks ranging from 60 to 400gsm, at a Morgana open house event toward the end of 2021. He explained, ‘The machine seemed to deliver everything we needed – the combination of the four processes of stitching, folding, spine forming, and trimming in one unit, with the option to produce SquareBack books of up to 10mm thick.’

With the machine now up and running in Aylesbury, the team at Pelican have been impressed with how simple it is to use. Mr Pople continued, ‘It’s very easy to set up the machine – and that’s essential when you are dealing with short-run work. We can be in production in five minutes – something that might have taken half-an-hour on the more complicated Muller Martini equipment. Typically, we might only be producing 50 or 100 books, so those runs can be produced in just 10 or 15 minutes.

‘We run a variety of publication sizes as well, and A6 sized work goes through the machine just as easily as the more regular A5 or A4 products.’