Launched on 5 July, it has seen readers, artists and friends rally around founders David and Ping Henningham, with over £8,000 pledged of a £12,000 target.
The latest donor, an anonymous charitable fund, has pledged to match the next £2,000 raised to help the microbusiness reach its goal.
“The response has been phenomenal,” David Henningham told Printweek.
Used to pre-funding book launches with pledges that total around £2,000, the couple had thought their problems insurmountable.
When they revealed to friends that they had around six months left in the business, Ping Henningham added, they were told in no uncertain terms they should go out and ask for help.
“They were telling us: ‘If this suddenly ends, everyone is going to be devastated. You need to tell people that this is going on.’,” Ping said.
The funding campaign initially asked just £2,700 to allow the Henninghams to finish production of a 15th anniversary edition of Paul Griffith’s cult novel Let Me Tell You and its sequel, Let Me Go On.
A further £9,300 of funding was listed so that Henningham Family Press might survive beyond that job.
Established in 2006, the company produces hand-bound collector’s editions alongside publishing short runs of paperbacks.
For one recent job, The Tomb Guardians, the Henninghams followed a 28-step Medieval binding process to complete a run of artist’s editions.
While the company no longer prints its paperback covers in-house, it foils and debosses them by hand on a JT Marshall platen press, and is highly involved in the printing process.
The cottage industry, however, hit trouble in 2021 after Britain left the EU customs union.
With each package – often containing no more than a £12.99 paperback – hit by a massively more complicated taxation, customs, and ordering process, Henningham soon found itself hemorrhaging European customers, and even sending books over at a loss.
David said: “The last two or three years have been a disaster in terms of postage and expansion.
“If you can get a best seller, you can get a warehouse to stock it in the Netherlands. But this is the question: how do you build up a customer base if you’re prevented from selling into a zone?
“I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to sit down in front of the computer, open up the Royal Mail business post app, fill in a line of API code which links it to our website, and clear customs there.
“If they’re buying from us, it’s a massive hassle, with all these extra charges – but they can far more easily buy it from Amazon.”
Henningham Family Press' crowdfunder is available here.
