Today is apparently Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year.  How apt that it's the day I end up saying "farewell then" to Cooper Clegg and its remaining 170 employees.  

As part of a general obsession with the web offset market I've followed the fortunes of this company for more than a decade. And I still believe that if it hadn't been for the vast amount of personal goodwill attached to Ian Cooper this is a business that would have shut years ago. In fact, even if Coop had changed the course of the company's history by selling out to Quebecor or St Ives way back when, I doubt that Tewkesbury would have been guaranteed any greater longevity.

Reading the comments on the closure story I see that Pindar, which did work hard to try and maintain the goodwill that Cooper built up, is coming in for some stick about passing the ownership to investors who clearly didn't. Pindar's reputation is unlikely to emerge entirely untarnished from this sorry episode, but without their intervention the business would surely have closed two years ago, so employees and suppliers have benefited from the business continuing to operate for that period at least.

As for the investors who bought it last year, I remain mystified as to the logic of the purchase in the first place. Perhaps the Cooper Clegg creditors' list will shed some light on their rationale.

Meanwhile, Coopers had sales of £26.7m according to its last accounts to September 2007. This may well have declined further since, but we're still looking at, what, circa £20m of web work that's been absorbed pretty seamlessly by other players. The supply/demand balance remains intriguing - I'm going to keep my eye on a Guardian article where they intend to track paginations of glossy consumer mags. The writer is focusing on monthlies, but I'm more interested in the paginations and circulations of those big women's weeklies, celeb mags and TV guides, as the knock-on impact of any fall off there will be huge.

The inevitable question is, who's next? Blue Monday could turn into a blue week, as I hear that another, albeit much smaller, web offset house is set to cease web printing too. And inevitably much of the current speculation centres on whether those Cooper Clegg investors can be more successful in the east of England than they were in the west.