A quick shout-out for some of the UK manufacturers showing their wares at drupa, and by all accounts doing us Brits proud.

Timsons is over-the-moon at the extremely positive reaction to its T-Press inkjet book production system, which really does look like a winner for book printers looking to add digital capabilities for industrial-scale production.  Shall be mighty interested to see which book printer follows St Ives Clays in buying the next one.

Yesterday I met with Roger Preston at Foiltone, who has developed a clever retrofit device for cold foiling and cast and cure hologram application. Worldwide sales, particularly among packaging printers, are growing strongly. Yet it seems UK printers are largely uninterested, which is a bit odd.

Also yesterday, I caught up with the chaps at Tech-ni-Fold who have come up with yet more nifty finishing devices. The hand operated CreaseStream Mini will surely sell like, well, hot sausages at the Messe - this delightfully simple bit of kit is surely a must for anyone producing mock-ups.

I also like the Auto version of the CreaseStream, targeted at that ‘graveyard' of old folders that are hanging around in printshops, and can be made to do something much more useful.

Watkiss has produced one of those ‘brilliant but simple' devices with the additional two-knife trimmer for its PowerSquare square back book making system.

Morgana is also riding the digital wave with its DigiBook system, and has notched up its most successful year ever for exports.

FFEI is keeping up its reputation for innovation with new software tools and the inkjet label press jointly-developed with Nilpeter.

Alphasonics is doing clever things with ultrasonic cleaning technology. 

I haven't seen all the UK manufacturers yet, in fact I'll be catching up with Domino tomorrow all being well. Have had a sneaky peek at the firm's N600i inkjet label press and it's looking very good.

And amid all the new-tech, how about this from Caslon? At the last count they'd sold at least one Adana letterpress press for every day of the show. Love it.

More musings from Drupa, day nine.

We've broken the back of the show now, and the intense press conference schedule of the first week is behind us.

One of the fascinating things from my own point-of-view has been observing the CEOs of a variety of manufacturers in their not-so-natural habitat.

The differences truly are extraordinary, and it made me think about how this must affect the culture at their various organisations.

I've met with CEOs who are amusing and engaging, yet most certainly as tough as nails should the need arise.

I've also seen CEOs who clearly have their entire team in a state of perpetual terror, fearing the next cat-kicking incident.

I've seen CEOs who have a bag carrier for their bag carrier.

I've seen CEOs talking about some new product or other that really should be very interesting, but with the sort of delivery that makes Arnie's turn in The Terminator look lively.

I've seen CEOs who've made a brief flag-waving appearance; and others who'll be here for the whole show.

I've seen CEOs who've talked with genuine passion about their products, customers and companies.

And I've seen CEOs who think that inserting the word "passionate" in a sentence will make it so.

All in all it's fascinating. Yet again I am reminded about the excellent biography of the late, great Steve Jobs, and the contradictions within this hugely successful man. He was an inspiration and a nightmare rolled into one.

There's no one-size-fits all when it comes to the big boss, but I know which combination of qualities I'd prefer to be working for.

Not many trade shows could announce a 20% reduction in visitor numbers and make it feel like a celebration.

Yet that's exactly what happened here at Drupa yesterday evening. Some 170,000 visitors had attended the show at the mid-point, a huge number of people but a fifth down on 2008.

However, the genuine feeling from exhibitors (not all of them, I'm sure, but a lot based on the people we've been talking to) is that they are happy to be meeting with serious companies who are here to buy.

Also an intriguing aspect is the number of big spenders from international territories. Xerox has reported a boom in orders from the Middle East and Russia, and Heidelberg was surprised to find China ranking alongside Germany in terms of order volumes thus far.

Fact is, we old world economies have far fewer printcos in 2012 than we did in 2008, the financial crisis/digital media surge saw to that. And at this Drupa I'm seeing fewer of the daytripper type of visitor who's just here to pick up as many free posters as possible, too.

Whereas in the good old days you might have had, say, six or seven people from a company attending for four or five days; in the new world ‘lean everything' order of things it's now perhaps a more focused team of two or three, and they're attending for a shorter period.

No doubt an infographic showing Altbier sales at the Irish Bar from Drupas 2000  through 2012 would illustrate this perfectly.

Will Drupa hit its hoped-for figure of 350,000 visitors by close of play? Another week of Groundhog Day Messe-style and we'll find out.

This morning I went to a very informative briefing here at Drupa, put on by the clever folk at InfoTrends.

That chap Barney Cox, late of this parish, had some insightful thoughts on the emerging market for digitally printed packaging, and said the sector was on the cusp of a major transformation.

He likened the arrival of the Highcon Euclid digital die-cutting and creasing system as having as much potential significance for packaging converters as the advent of CTP did for commercial printers in the nineties.

The Euclid is certainly one of the must-sees at drupa for any serious packaging printer. It's not cheap, at around $900,000, but as the machine removes the need for costly dies, and all the inherent tools, counter plates, storage and management of same - never mind the time-savings in not having to make dies in the first place - it's easy to see why beta site Graphica Bezalel is singing its praises.

And isn't it fascinating that this development has come from a company that's just two-and-a-half years old, and run by alumni from the Indigo and HP school of digital printing?

Also noteworthy is the connection to another Drupa must-see, Landa, which is an investor in Highcon via its Landa Ventures wing.

InfoTrends chief Jeff Hayes opened this morning's briefing with a great phrase: "Technology disrupts, and recessions clarify," meaning that in recession business owners have to make hard choices about what to do, and when.

There's no shortage of [potentially] disruptive technologies on show here in Dusseldorf. Those print bosses who've come to Drupa with chequebooks at the ready should avoid too much Altbier, as they will need the clearest head possible in order to decide what to buy, and when.

Greetings from the penultimate build day before Drupa officially opens its doors tomorrow.

Shall be here for the whole show, do swing by and say hello if you're in the vicinity of Hall 7, where, along with my estimable colleagues from  Druck+Medien, ProPrint and PrintWeek India, I'll mostly be working away on the Drupa Report Daily.

Blog postings may be somewhat erratic during this Drupa hiatus, I'm already confused about which way is up, never mind what day it is, and the show hasn't even started yet.

Keep an eye on @printweek on Twitter for updates and pics.

The Messe is looking good, during some impromptu travels around the halls during the build I've already seen a whole bunch of new and interesting stuff beyond the product announcements we know about from the industry's big names.  We aren't going to be short of stories, that's for sure.

The most jaw-dropping thing at the moment is the rash of Landa announcements. The firm hasn't even held its press conference yet (that'll be at 2pm today Dusseldorf time) and despite the cloak of secrecy around precisely what Benny Landa's Nanography process is, some the biggest names in press manufacturing are already convinced.

First Komori, then Manroland Sheetfed, and now this morning the big one - Heidelberg - have all entered into strategic alliances to develop presses using Nanography. This is some coup for Benny Landa and his team, I really can't think of anything like this happening before.

At this rate it won't be the inkjet 2.0 Drupa, or the web-to-print Drupa, it'll be the Landa Drupa.

Given the amount of excitement that's already emerged in the run-up to Drupa, with the latest announcements from Landa being a case in point, I wonder what else the show will have in store for us in the way of mega-news?

Apart from all the new kit and new technology news from the manufacturers, an essential component of any big expo is The Landmark Order.

Thinking about this caused me to reflect on exhibitions past. One only needs to glance at the archives to see that it simply wouldn't be Ipex or Drupa without news of a big order from Anton Group. Let's see if the Laindon chaps will be going to Germany with chequebook at the ready once again.

Elsewhere some orders that might have fitted the bill are already known knowns - Communisis and its big digital spend with HP, St Ives and its digital book printing investment with Kodak and Timsons, and Precision Printing set to be the first with a HP 10000 B2 device.

What about at the big ticket end of print? For obvious reasons large newspaper re-equipping orders appear likely to be thin on the ground, at least here in the UK.

In web offset, though, there's a potential candidate for The Landmark Order. I speak of Polestar, of course. Older readers may wish to cast their minds back to Drupa 1995 and - oh yes - The Landmark Order BPC's John Holloran signed with Manroland for seven web presses. It was a £47m deal.

Three years later Polestar was formed and the rest, along with some of those web presses, is ancient history.

Could this be the year that dreams of a big web offset shed next to the big gravure shed starting coming to fruition? And might such a thing involve a new press vendor?

Shall certainly be keeping eyes peeled for sightings of Messrs Hibbert, Andreou et al in the halls. Do let me know if you see them.

Whoever it was at GF Smith who came up with the idea for the Beauty in the Making event, held this week, deserves a gold star. Several gold stars in fact.

I was there yesterday and it was marvellous.

I loved the use of pallets of Colorplan as wayfinders around the event. Well done to whoever did the letter stencilling, by the way.

I loved having a go at letterpress printing on a variety of Adana presses, under the watchful eye of letterpress professionals from Downey.

I loved attempting to make a handmade envelope that would meet the exacting fold standards of expert GF Smith envelope maker Sandra, who made it all look so easy even though it very definitely wasn't.

I loved all the wonderful tactile papers featured throughout.

I loved the fact that loads of other people - including young folk who have no doubt grown up in a screen-based environment - were loving all of this too.

I was beyond excited to see the Monotype exhibit featuring some of Eric Gill's original sketches for Gill Sans. In fact, I think I actually squealed at one point. Sorry about that, fellow attendees.

I loved Linotype: The Film, and it was great to see some ex-Linotype colleagues in the audience too. It really is a terrific film (here's a link to the earlier review of it by our special New York correspondent James Chase). Good news, the DVD will be out soon.

I laughed, but I also shed a tear because the film has some incredibly poignant moments, as well as amusing ones, and it made me think about another wonderful being - the late, great Lawrence Wallis. I know he would have loved the event and the film too and I so wish he could have been there.

I like to think that Lawrence is sitting on his cloud keeping an eye on all that goes on in print anyway. But for those of us still fortunate to have our feet on the planet, if you're in London and can get to Bloomsbury before 6pm, go see Beauty in the Making. It's a guaranteed way to top up those all-important joy levels.

"Who can do short-run spot varnishing" is an oft-asked question in the parallel world of Jo's Help Line, and it's an area that's proved tricky to crack - remember the seemingly nifty Dryprint printer/coater shown at Northprint 2009? That product has subsequently been shelved.

A year later at Ipex 2010 Scodix launched what was described as the "world's first" digital embossing press.

The high-build UV varnish was something of a sensation at the show, leaving the Scodix team ecstatic as they took orders for the entire year's production of machines.

Since then Scodix has been busy building up a worldwide reseller network, although news of actual installations is rather thinner on the ground - RCS in Retford being the notable UK install I'm aware of.

One of the challenges for manufacturers targeting this market is the registration vagaries of some digital print output, which becomes a big issue when you're trying to apply a spot varnish to a moving target.

Drupa will provide a great opportunity for a comprehensive update on where digital spot coating is at, and there's a lot going on. Scodix will have new B3 and B2 devices along with inkjet Braille and a new digital glittering process that's sure to be a wow. Can't wait to see the results.

Yesterday MGI announced its new JetVarnish 3D spot UV coater, which looks to be going head-to-head with Scodix; and this very morning I was handed an impressive sample produced on Autobond's spot UV inkjet device (a new B2 portrait version will be at Drupa), which also included Braille text.

Must-sees (or should that be "must-feels") for fans of tactile print effects.

Last week I had an interesting chat with someone who's working on a new project that, if successful, is likely to generate lots of additional printed items by the simple expedient of making it easy for people to do just that via social media.

Shall look forward to learning more about it, and will of course be writing about it properly once it's officially made public.

Per blogs passim, I love hearing about how digital media success stories have resulted in a desire for real, tangible products. The Angry Birds range of toys, books, t-shirts, stationery - and now playing cards - being a case in point.

Elsewhere it's good to see online behemoths making the most of the media mix in terms of their own marketing. Via IOS/Lateral Group's Jason Cromack, who highlighted this blog by John Battelle, I learned that Facebook is using direct mail to promote its advertising options.

And Google is also known to send out the odd DM piece, too. Actually the volumes are rather more than "odd".

Talking of Google, while studying today's Google Doodle homage to Gideon Sundback, inventor of the zipper, I stumbled upon something else - the Google Doodle store. Here I can buy t-shirts, posters, mugs and more featuring what seems to be the complete archive of Doodle artworks. I'm already thinking of someone who might well like an Eadward J Muybridge t-shirt.

The Doodle store is powered by Zazzle, a remarkable company that came to my attention a couple of years back when it cropped up in a Help Line question.

My point in all of this is that if we view demand for print wearing blinkers based on what was the bread-and-butter print work of old, then it's easy to focus on decline. But there really is jam today and tomorrow for those whose eyes are open to a whole world of potential new print opportunities.

Yesterday I was privileged to attend a memorial service for the late, great John Crosfield.

Many tributes, both moving and amusing, were paid to this extraordinary individual, who truly was a man of many talents.

He had vision and belief in his ideas. There was a great tale about him inventing acoustic mines during his work for the navy in World War II, despite being instructed by his superior to work on a different device. He kept at it because he knew acoustic mines would be more effective, and he was right.

Former Crosfield managing director Jim Salmon described Crosfield as a "talented and lucky man" - with the stand-out lucky moment being selling Crosfield to De La Rue just weeks before the 1974 oil crisis hit, reducing the company's order backlog from 18 months to two at a stroke. "Without De La Rue behind us Crosfield would have been finished," Salmon stated.

Crosfield was generous with his time and his wealth, and gave away the fruits of his success to family, friends, charities and people in need.

He knew the value of brand ambassadors long before the term was coined. Apprentices came from all over the world to work at Crosfield, and then went on to champion the firm's products across the globe.

His granddaughter described him as being an inspiration in "how to live life fearlessly" - when his lab was destroyed during the war, he managed to see the funny side in the remnants, and picked himself up and started again. "When life falls apart, use a bit of humour and rebuild". He always saw the positive side of things, rather than dwelling on negatives.

He was friendly and interested in everything and everybody - compare and contrast with some modern-day rule by fear executives.

It called to mind the "What would Steve Jobs do?" book about another celebrated leader.

We in print could usefully add a "what would John Crosfield do?" pause for consideration. His heyday may have been in the last century, but his ethos provides enduring inspiration.

Hands up who's going to Drupa?

If you're not, because you're too busy, or you think it's too expensive, I urge you to think again.

This has all the hallmarks of being an extra-special Drupa. It's always an amazing event, but the number of must-see exhibits this year really is going off the scale.

This morning we learned that Fujifilm will unveil a new digital inkjet web press at the show, which makes at least five brand new must-sees in that space including KBA, Timsons, Komori and Landa Digital Printing.

In digital sheetfed we've gone from having a couple of B2 offerings to a whole swathe, and (that man Landa again) a new B1 device.

In terms of where future print tech is heading, this Drupa is shaping up to be a watershed.

I think it's also going to provide a much-needed boost of positivity. Seeing all of the very many clever things the industry's manufacturers are working on across all areas of print production in one (albeit enormous) space is going to be an absolute tonic.

Considering the relatively short distance between us here on the small island and Dusseldorf, even from the pointy bit at the top, it is quite simply crazy not to jump on a plane, train or automobile in order to be there.

I can confidently say that the Messe showground is going to be awash with printers who will have travelled from every far flung corner of the globe to do just that.

There's still a fortnight to get organised, and the show itself runs for two weeks. So you've got a month. Please don't miss out.

Yesterday I was at the London Book Fair. Judging by all the noise in book publishing around ebooks and digital platforms I was half-expecting the entire thing to be comprised of a giant iPad and a giant Kindle.

How delightful to find it full of books. Real, actual books. Big books, small books, colourful books, black-and-white books, modern recreations of medieval books... I imagine every type of book under the sun was there somewhere.

Naturally I made a beeline to the publishing solutions zone to find printers to bother.

First-time Book Fair exhibitor Imprint Digital of Exeter was showing off its new online price calculator which makes it easy for publishers to get instant pricing. It has clever features such as the option for "randomly placed colour pages" within a book.

Berforts was promoting its union with Information Press and the merits of British book printing, and had a nifty book giveaway of its own that's a guide to book printing and self publishing. It includes samples of different paper types along with black-and-white and colour images, and pages of useful advice for self publishers.

MD Gerald White imparted an interesting snippet about a new customer who approached Berforts after being successful in ebooks, saying "now we need to print some proper ones". Rah to that.

All in all the book vibe seemed pretty positive. As I walked past the enormous graphic of JK Rowling on the Little, Brown booth I made sure to genuflect in anticipation of a bumper upcoming print run for The Casual Vacancy. Please let it be a tome, not a novella.

Pre-packs, phoenixes, call them what you will but when such dealings involve a certain set of circumstances, in particular original directors buying back a failed business and then carrying on with flawed business practices, it's fairly certain that there will be an understandably outraged/jaundiced [delete as applicable] view of the outcome.

I'm wondering, is there anywhere in the world where they have this sort of legislation right? What can we learn from how the situation is handled elsewhere?

The fact that it's so difficult to think of examples of ‘successful' pre-packs whereby firms have been sold to existing management or directors, and then subsequently gone on to re-establish themselves as stable, well-run companies points to a very obvious problem with where we are now in terms of the UK legislation.

Perhaps we could take a leaf out of the US bankruptcy law books, by having court-appointed officers involved. They could oversee the activities of pre-packs. There could be a standard fee structure based on the company size.

Activities that are most distressing to competitors, such as the oft-mentioned pricing work below cost, would be legally forbidden for, say, a three-year period and subject to scrutiny by the aforementioned officer, with heavy penalties for abuse.

Might such a thing help weed out the opportunists causing such carnage by abusing the current system? And where, if anywhere, in the world do they get this stuff right?

What links the musicians P!nk, Miles Davis, and the Anti Nowhere League?

Answer: they've all produced tracks titled ‘So what?'

The very basic ‘so what?' question is a helpful point of consideration for Drupa visitors and exhibitors alike.

A new gizmo can produce amazing quality. But so what if it costs a fortune and the quality gain will be imperceptible for all but a tiny minority of clients?

This new gadget is really, really fast. But so what if it's also really, really temperamental, and will never work reliably.

It's really, really cheap. But so what if it's a classic case of you get what you pay for, and the results are going to be unsaleable.

This new thing is way ahead of everyone else's thing in price/performance. But so what if it's essentially vapourware that won't ship for years.

It's really big. So what?

It's really small. So what?

It's revolutionary. So what if you'd rather not be a guinea pig for an as-yet unproven technology.

While P!nk's ‘na-na-na-na-na-na-na' refrain is unlikely to replace the Drupa song as the tune on everyone's lips come May, the ‘so what?' question remains an enduringly useful sanity check - useful for visitors to ask, and for exhibitors to be able to answer. 

When it comes to mastering the art of brand extension, Pantone really are right up there. The other day I discovered by chance that it's now possible to buy Pantone makeup - would you believe it?

Pantone has teamed up with beauty retailer Sephora for the range, launched in New York via a clever pop-up shop that looks like - you guessed it - a giant Pantone colour guide swatchbook.

The products, including lipsticks, eyeshadows and nail colours are themed around the Pantone Universe Colour of the Year, Tangerine Tango. Not quite sure the palette of "lush red-oranges" will do much for yours truly. But still, there could be an acceptable toenail colour in their I s'pose.

Perhaps more surprising cosmetic brand extension news comes from Fujifilm (yes, Fujifilm) which has taken collagen and antioxidant know-how gleaned from making film emulsions and transmogrified it into a range of anti-ageing face creams that go by the brand name of Astalift.

Whatever next? It's already possible to buy beauty products featuring nano technology, so perhaps Benny Landa might consider expanding his nano printing product range - nano spray tan, anyone?