BRATTLEBORO — Gordon Bristol, of Newfane, one of 15 members of his family who worked in the printing, typesetting, and prepress industry in Brattleboro in the past century, says printing has been “a good salt-of-the-earth industry for the town.”
“If you needed a job, you knew that you could find one there,” he said.
Not anymore.
Due to its strategic geographical position as a river valley town and tri-state gateway, and its proximity to New York and Boston, the town, almost from its birth, has served as a backdrop for industrial innovation, including the typesetting, printing, and publishing industries that maintained the strongest hold and eventually propelled the town into the national spotlight (see sidebar).
But due to continual consolidation and pressure to divert labor overseas - drawing an end to the dominance of more than two centuries of tradition, a large skilled labor force, and creative economy in a centralized region - that legacy has swiftly dwindled in the last decade.
A long legacy
Brattleboro established itself as a printing seedbed, the industry materializing well before the mid-nineteenth-century boom of paper mills, papermaking machinery companies and other allied manufacturing ventures (see sidebar).
“Brattleboro, being so close to New York and Boston, has been a crossroads town since the early 1900s,” Bristol said. “Its booming print industry was a logical extension of this. Plus there was that hard-working Vermont ethic here."
“Printing is a very tedious, exacting process - there's not a lot of time to be going back and forth fixing errors when you're handling runs of thousands of copies of a book,” Bristol said. “Workers have to get it right the first time, and Brattleboro's did.”
By the 1950s, five companies were experiencing a relatively simultaneous rise. Bristol Offset, Irving Perkins Associates, American Stratford Graphics Services, and Book Press in Brattleboro, and NK Graphics across the river in West Chesterfield, N.H., maintained a niche until until pyramid-structure corporate takeovers dwindled the area's market.
The threads of the business that persist are Stratford TexTech (the result of a 2006 merger between Stratford Publishing Services - part of the American Stratford Graphics lineage - and India-based TexTech) and a handful of small commercial and specialty printers.
Community members connected to the industry in various capacities over the last half-century maintain differing stances on the decline, and they waver on how it's affecting Brattleboro, and also how the overarching trend affects commerce, the workforce and publishing culture nationwide.
A family business
Gordon Bristol's late father, Ed Bristol, founded Bristol Offset. His cousin, Jim Bristol of Brattleboro, owned Stratford Publishing and now serves as president of U.S. operations at Stratford TexTech.
Gordon Bristol's uncle, Verne Bristol of Dummerston, began working at American Stratford Graphics in 1959; he worked there in Linotype (hot metal) printing for 25 years, then left to become president and CEO of Rescue Inc. in Brattleboro for 12 years.
When Verne's son, Jim, acquired American Stratford and turned it into Stratford Publishing in 1996, Jim asked his recently retired father, now 77, to come back and work for him under the new banner, where Verne continues to work to this day.
Gordon himself worked at Bristol Offset for a few years after high school, but was one of the few in both his and his father's generation who did not pursue Brattleboro printing as a lifelong endeavor.
“The Bristols are a hard-working family that came from a solid, working-class ethic,” he continued. “In my family it was just part of the natural tradition - you worked for a while in the family business, and that's why I stinted at Bristol Offset.”
But “typesetting and printing is not a lifelong choice for everyone,” Gordon admitted. “Some are there for a little while, some for long. I had other priorities.”
“This was the mid-1980s, and it was obvious that things were changing in the industry. I wasn't ready to change with it,” Gordon said. “It was obvious that things were going to become more and more consolidated.”
“As a society, we sacrificed the quality and specificity of old printing standards with the desire to forego the status quo,” he explained.
“When you look at older printing, there were codes and rules of specifics,” he said. “Society said, we don't need to be perfect anymore; things don't need to be specific. So we embraced the advent of desktop publishing in the late 1970s and early 1980s and let some of that aesthetic trickle into companies' practices.”
“People at home no longer needed to hire professional typesetters and printers. We began to ship our skilled work overseas, where people had to be trained to do the same jobs. As a society we chose not to deal with extra effort if we didn't have to.”
Others in the family, like his cousin Jim, flowed easily with the changes in computer typography and page layout technology and the wave of consolidations in the industry.
“I commend Jimmy - he had a vision of where he wanted to go with his company and figured out a way to go forward with it and make it happen,” Gordon said.
No jobs, no unions
“You can see the way printing evolved by looking at Brattleboro's history,” explained Verne Bristol, Jim's father. “The process became more efficient, which I think is the natural way with all industries. But when you meet new technology and adapt to it, your technology becomes better and fewer people are needed to run it.”
Former industry workers cite technological advancement as one reason for the job losses and the decline of wages as jobs became less physically demanding.
“It was very much a unionized industry for a long time,” he continued. “But not anymore. We used to have strikes and all sorts of unioned activities. But, as it naturally happens with computerization, many of those jobs are gone.”
Book Press once stood as the largest and most successful of the Brattleboro area's five major 20th-century printing and prepress companies, and employed approximately 800 people at its height.
Montreal-based Quebecor Inc. - then the largest printer in the world - bought Book Press in 1987. In late 1999 the company announced the plant's closing, and mass layoffs - of 500 employees, according to the Brattleboro Town Plan - by fall 2000. A handful of employees were kept on to dismantle the presses and handle other clean-up, then let go. According to some news reports at the time, some jobs transferred to the company's Taunton, Mass., book manufacturing plant.
Union member Andrew Lamoreaux of West Brattleboro worked at Book Press as a bundler and roll tender from 1995 until his layoff in spring 2000. Directly prior, he'd worked in the press room in the same capacity at the Brattleboro Reformer until that newspaper was bought by Denver-based Media NewsGroup and rehired a smaller staff.
“Quebecor shut down the unions and then the plant to consolidate [the operations] with their bigger branches in Taunton, Mass., and in Tennessee,” Lamoreaux said. “There was always friction between the company and the union. We had to drag things out of them, like our benefits. There'd always be arguments and a lot of shouting and screaming. There was a good deal of political dealings that I didn't get into, but it was known that [Quebecor] started reorganizing everything because of disagreements with our union.”
Lamoreaux said a union leader had told him that the company “wanted to shut down the union and then actually reopen the plant, populating it their way. There was a buzz going around that the reason they wanted to break the union was because of demands for more money and the watchdog eyes being kept for workers' sake.”
Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation purchased the facility in 2000 and created the Brattleboro Industrial Park as a shared business incubator site.
Outsourcing overseas
Dede Cummings, a freelance book designer and production artist in Brattleboro, had worked in Boston as a trade fiction designer at Simon & Schuster, a company that in the early '80s sent nearly all of its production to Brattleboro type houses, contracting typesetting, printing, and project management work at flat fees per published book page.
“Brattleboro had the best reputation in the industry. [Its houses] knew companies' styles and followed directions immaculately. I could say things like, 'print the characters tight but not touching' or 'slight kerning between letters,' and Brattleboro [firms] would know what I meant and do it. They had an old-school sensibility; this was prior to computers. Even Xerox machines were new.”
After moving to town in 1986, she began working for Irving Perkins Associates, one such book design firm. Perkins, of Newfane, also operated a type shop, Pagesetters, which eventually became a division of Stratford Publishing.
“Competition was very stiff from other companies trying to get work; at a price of $8-10 per page, it was a very lucrative industry,” Cummings said. “But then, around 1996, offshore companies in India and the Caribbean Islands began to compete by charging lower prices. I'd been working in Brattleboro for 10 years at that point, and I started to get scared of losing my job.”
“You started hearing from publishers, 'I got a great deal from this big company who sends the keyboarding [the term for typing a paper-copy manuscript or entering a copy editor's changes prior to design and printing], to a different country.' Why pay a woman in Brattleboro $8 per hour to keyboard when you could get it much cheaper [out of the country] in Jamaica?”
“Companies began to fall like dominoes,” Cummings continued. “Suddenly there began to be shorter work weeks [at Irving Perkins]. I realized that I could probably do everything the type houses were doing and struck out on my own as a freelancer.”
Nancy Crompton, also of Brattleboro, experienced a similar trajectory during her 12 years as a typesetter and project manager with Stratford Publishing.
“I quit when it was sold to TexTech,” Crompton explained. “I was reading a great deal about outsourcing at the time and trying to understand what was happening to these jobs. What I didn't understand was that people would continue to be laid off until the current state of a mere skeleton crew over there.”
“I would have still been [at Stratford] if they hadn't been sold,” she added. “It was a job I thought I'd have for life - I enjoyed the people I worked with, I enjoyed the work. But I could not rationalize continuing to work for a company that had sold out, [that] was willingly giving jobs away to people in India.”
“Some of these young Indian workers - about 20 years old, no families yet - would come from overseas to the company to learn the trade, and workers here would be appointed to train them,” Crompton said. Those young workers would return to India, bringing the jobs with them.
“The Stratford workers, like workers in this same situation everywhere, would be told that they were doing a good thing by training the newcomers, that [the Indian employees] would make the company more efficient and even more productive, and that he or she [the Stratford worker] would become more of a manager instead of a worker. Yet they were essentially training someone else to do their job. And then, their job evaporated.”
Though Crompton disagreed with the takeover of labor by foreign workers, she empathized with them and feels that they are ultimately being exploited far beyond their American counterparts.
“I liked these Indian kids,” she said. “They were so eager and happy to be working. They were making a decent salary, they didn't mind working 16-hour shifts, they could go out nightclubbing after work, they didn't have families to worry about yet… But I think that one day they will realize they are being exploited, exploited like workers everywhere.”
Mid-19th-century German socialist activist Ferdinand Lassalle theorized that all attempts to improve the real income of workers were futile. Under this theory, “work will always go to the lowest paid worker,” Crompton said.
“And I realize that's what's going on as a bottom line,” she added. “These printing companies are falling into corporate hands determined to make large profits from an industry that has historically reaped a low profit margin for the sake of knowledge.”
Crompton described publishing's role historically as “a labor of love for the sake of human literacy, education and awareness.”
“Now these small companies - who labored over page and ink for a 5-percent profit for centuries - have been bought out by companies determined to reap huge numbers, and they must bend with the methods being used to do so,” she said. “Domestic production was sacrificed to these yields.”
Changing to survive
From a corporate stance, such evolution is necessary for companies to survive in an ever-changing global marketplace - and “the publishers basically dictated the way the industry was headed, because they are the buyers,” said former Stratford owner Jim Bristol. “You get scared that you'll lose their business if you don't comply.”
Bristol, who worked his way up from the ground pressroom level in high school and personally experienced the evolution of Brattleboro's industry, now serves as president of U.S. operations at Stratford TexTech on Landmark Hill. He made the decision for the company he once owned to be acquired in 2006 by TexTech, a composition firm in Chennai, India.
Companies like Stratford once thrived because their clients “used to do their own copy editing and project management, but then it went to companies like Stratford,” Bristol said. “Publishers were trying to downsize their own staff.” Outsourcing services saved them money.
But then the same clients “also began taking the jobs that [Stratford] used to do and dictating prices that we couldn't afford to charge - prices they could get directly from companies in India or the Philippines - and forced us to in turn outsource their project's work overseas for jobs like keyboarding.”
By 2001, “publishers started coming to us saying, 'You have to drop your prices by 20 percent,' and would direct us to companies in India that they already had contracts with, with instructions to send basic tasks there,” Bristol said. “Publishers in Boston, New York, and New Jersey would demand that we partner with these companies because they 'didn't want to work with two companies,' they wanted to work with just one.”
That market pressure ultimately led to Stratford marketing its strategic partnership with TexTech to its clients well before it bought the company outright.
“As much as the corporate level wants the competitive prices and their work done overseas,” he explained, client employees with day-to-day contact with the project “still wanted to deal with Americans for sales and marketing, customer service, and familiarity with product.”
In what Bristol calls the “hybrid model,” Americans handle sales, customer service, and project management, and Indians handle production. “We found a way to take the American knowledge base and spread it to India, with production there, and then bring the product back to the U.S.”
Bristol said Stratford's former 40-person staff has shrunk to half under the new model.
“We didn't need as many people to produce the books,” he said. “That is definitely a downside. But the upside is that the employees who still work here are paid higher wages - 20 to 30 percent more - and have less manual labor.”
“I watched other companies around me falter because they did not make the 'hybrid' move,” Bristol said. “NK Graphics, for example - they've been doing business in the old-fashioned way, and it hurt them to the point that I will be acquiring them in three weeks.”
TexTech's worth has increased from $2.7 million to $5 million since the merger, Bristol said.
“Deciding to allow Stratford to be acquired by a larger company was a smart business move that's allowed it to still exist; to grow, even, and to thrive, expanding its reach and capabilities and maintaining jobs for Vermonters,” he said.
“As long as we continue to do well and are able to lure people to work in Brattleboro from big cities like New York and Boston - which has happened - to allow us to do all of the things that these publishers want us to do, we should be all right here in Brattleboro,” Bristol added.
Global mergers
As TexTech International, Statford TexTech's parent company based in Chennai, India, is itself set to be acquired this month by a large French printing conglomerate called Jeuve, based in Paris, it appears that the future of the industry is truly a pyramid model.
Jeuve prints in 23 languages and is a $150 million enterprise. Six months after it acquires TexTech and all of the companies under that umbrella, including Stratford and NK Graphics, it will be renamed Jeuve North America and will be one of the most international companies in the world.
But the same technology that helped accelerate the job loss has moved within reach of individuals and small businesses who now can bypass the industry completely, changing the entire model of book publishing and marketing.
On-demand printing now makes it economically feasible to publish limited print runs of book titles, and companies like iUniverse and CafePress have emerged to provide print services to independent publishers and individuals.
Cummings now works with Newfane mystery novelist Archer Mayor, who purchased the rights to his out-of-print titles and has released the series under his own imprint, taking full advantage of this technology.
“It's closer to home now, with Kindle and iUniverse,” said Cummings. “The entire printing industry is in transition and in crisis, with the little people losing first."
“But I'm optimistic, because people still want to hold books in their hands, books with beautiful designs and well-designed pages,” she says.
“That will persist. And within that, there's hope.”