Mormon

As one of the world’s largest in-plants, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ 350-employee Printing Division has some impressive equipment in its Salt Lake City facility. The sound of its Timson and manroland web presses fills the air on a typical day as they crank out long-run jobs for distribution around the world.

Only a handful of organizations operate in-house book binding facilities. IPG recently took a look inside. by Cindy Waeltermann In a time when technology advances focus on simplifying and speeding up printing and binding processes, it's ironic that the best method for binding a book is sometimes no different than it was in the 14th century—with a needle and thread. "It's pretty labor intensive," observes Marc Flechsig, manager of the University of Minnesota's bindery. His book binding operation does about 5 percent of its binding by hand, he says, following criteria set by the Library Binding Institute. Basically, if a book is thicker than