The 20-staff, family-run business took delivery of the ex-showroom device last month and was up and running straight away after a quick refresher for staff who had previous experience of running booklet machines, according to managing director Mark Savage.

The bookletmaker can produce up to 4,600 A5 booklets per hour 1-up and 9,000 per hour 2-up. It is specified with a DBM-600T face trimmer, DKT-200 top and bottom trimmer and DSC-10/60i suction tower collator.

“When we were emerging from lockdown, we landed a job that involved folding a lot of leaflets. We already have three folders, which fold a lot of bookwork for our Stitchliner, so it just means we don’t have to interrupt any work going through there,” Savage told Printweek.

“We wanted to stop bottlenecks in finishing and it’s doing exactly that. Thankfully we had the operator skills already from a previous system so we were up and running after a quick refresh. It’s absolutely worth it.”

Doveton produces work predominantly for local businesses including restaurants, design houses and schools, and Savage said it had a “nice amount” of national work as well.

“We do a lot of work for restaurants, so that completely stopped last year, but it’s all coming back to life now, which is good. We’ve been picking up some nice new jobs here and there over the last few weeks, which sadly I think has something to do with so many printers disappearing after the last 18 months.

“It was like the end of the world in the first lockdown but since then we have started slowly and built up, almost like starting again. After a few months we seem to be back to a new normal.

“We are actually really busy again now. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to pre-Covid levels. Turnover was £3.5m before Covid and I don’t know what we might settle at after this,” said Savage.

The company runs Heidelberg Linoprint CP and CV digital printers and the new bookletmaker joins a Duplo DBP-500 binder that was installed in February this year after it was originally purchased just before the first lockdown of 2020.

“We do a lot of digital, short-run book blocks, and we always wanted to get into perfect bound books because it was becoming a pain outsourcing it all. We then saw that Duplo had one available, again it was secondhand as a university was upgrading theirs, so we went for it.”

The device has a cycling speed of 525bph with a maximum size of 360x320mm and minimum size of 120x120mm.