invi TAT IONS - Jack Kemp Foundation

Printing
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Press. Many are reluctant to
disclose earnings or even a
list of clients for fear they
may become targets of
competitors.
By far the largest area
printing plant is that of the
Connecticut-based Arcata
Graphics Co., which bought
Buffalo's J.W. Clement Co. in
1965 and changed its name
to Arcata in 1970.
Arcata's Depew plant —
where the Reader's Digest is
printed every month — employs
1,800 in the nation's
largest printing plant under
one roof.
Arnong other publications
that come off the presses in
its eighteen-acre facility are
the National Enquirer, Time,
Playgirl, New York, People,
Consumer Reports and the
American Automobile Association's
famous tour guides.
Every weekend Arcata receives
copy for Tirne magazine
via satellite. Late Saturday
night the presses, which
print 450,000 copies of the
newsweekly, start rolling, and
by Sunday afternoon the first
copies of the magazine are in
the mail to subscribers.
Arcata's annual postage
bill is $30 million, making the
Depew post office, which has
a 24-hour branch in the Arcata
plant, a bigger revenue
producer than the post office
of the city of Seattle.
Arcata also prints
one-third of the nation's
paperbacks
— for such publishers
as Warner,
Simon & Schuster and
Harlequin.
While Arcata is part of a
corporation that does a half
billion dollars worth of business
a year with headquarters
elsewhere, Greater
Buffalo Press, at $300 million
mammoth operation out oi
distinctly unassuming digs on
the second floor of a former
Pierce-Arrow wire-wheel
factory.
"We're kind of low-key.
It's our way of doing things,"
says Paul J. Koessler, who,
with his brother, Jack, commands
Greater Buffalo, far
and away the nation's biggest
printer of color cornics.
So inconspicuous is the
Grote Street headquarters —
identified only by the initials
"GBP" in small letters above
its door — that most strangers
drive by without realizing
they have passed the command
post of a major international
printing firm with
plants in Canada, California,
Texas, Alabama, Pennsylvania
and Iowa as well as in Dunkirk.
Of Greater Buffalo's 2,000
employees, 1,100 work in
plants in the Buffalo area, in
Dunkirk and in nearby Stevensville,
Ontario.
The company prints 220
million four-page color comics
sections per week, many of
them on the world's largest
letterpress in its Dunkirk facility,
Great Lakes Color
Printing Corp. GBP's inks are
also mixed in Dunkirk.
Besides printing Sunday
comics for some 500 newspapers,
Greater Buffalo
makes the photographic negatives
used for press plates for
all the color comics printed in
North America. Much of the
sophisticated, computerized
equipment used in the process
has been developed by
Greater Buffalo and Calspan.
Besides containing the
cornics, the nation's Sunday
papers are likely to be delivered
to readers with color
advertising inserts from such
national retail chains as K-
Mart, Sears Roebuck and
Montgomery-Ward, many of
them printed by Greater
Buffalo.
Greater Buffalo owes
much of its grol,vth to its
development of a technique
that made newspaper color
simpler and less expensive to
print.
The traditional process for
printing color on newsprint
— the kind of paper used for
newspapers — was rotogravure,
a method in which the
ink is held in tiny pits on a
roller and transferred to
paper. Greater Buffalo's new
method is called heatset-offset,
and it uses offset presses
On a iiat pia! e.
"We came along with a
product that began to approach
rotogravure in quality
on the same kind of paper
stock that roto was using, but
now we can produce the
product in five plants across
the country for less than roto
can do it in two plants," says
company president Paul
Koessler. (Brother Jack is
chairman.)
The new technique, Paul
says, offers large advertisers
two advantages: "It cuts
transportation costs, and it
cuts your advance time because
if you are going to
print in five plants at the
same time you are going to
do the job weeks ahead of the
time of printing it in two
plants."
The new process has also
enabled it to print Sunday
magazine sections for many
of the nation's big newspapers,
including BUFFALO,
the magazine you are
reading.
Arnong those newspapers
are the Milwaukee Journal,
the Minneapolis Tribune, the
Boston Herald and the Memphis
Commercial Appeal. In
addition, Greater Buffalo
prints the TV magazine for
the nation's largest-circulation
newspaper, The Sunday
New York Daily News, as
well as its color comics.
0 ver
in Cheektowaga,
the F.N. Burt
Co. does a far different
type of
printing for national
companies. It produces eyecatching
boxes for the consumer
trade for companies
such as Eastman Kodak, Seagram's,
Faberge, Avon, Danskin
and Bausch & Lomb.
Recently, its designers
have been working on a special
gift box to hold a crystal
work being created by Steuben
Glass for the recommissioning
of the famed battleship
the USS Missouri, on
which the peace treaty was
signed ending World War II
nearly 40 years ago.
"People always think of us
as box makers, but we're
really printers," says coowner
W. Russell Hurd. Hurd
and his partner, C. Taylor
Kew, both from the Buffalo
area, bought the 98-year-old
company from the Moore
Corp. in 1983.
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