One of the very first jobs that Derek passed over to me was the printing of the newsletters, that most important link with all our customers, whether renting or purchasing films. Derann possessed an ancient AB Dick offset printer and I was shown what to do and put to work. That machine could sorely try my patience! I would always finish work with my hands ingrained with printing ink, often getting it on my clothing. As far as I can recall Derann only has a small number of newsletter subscribers at this time, but no film rental or purchase left the building without at least half a dozen sales lists/flyers and it wasn’t long before we upped our game and started our newsletter subscriptions proper. Adrian could collate 100 catalogues in just a few hours, I don’t think anyone ever beat his record. New and updated catalogues for the 8mm and 16mm film libraries were a constant headache as new titles were added several times a month. As our product range grew in stature, the need for better labels required that we buy an all singing, all dancing offset printer, one that could print overlays and produce full colour work, we settled for a Gestetner chain fed machine. ‘The Avengers’, ‘Gullivers Travels’ and the early Hammer titles were some of the labels that I can remember printing, often having trouble with colour registration, but when things progressed well it was a most rewarding experience. I can remember even now the excitement of seeing the full colour work on ‘The Sound of Music’ label as day by day the four colours, starting with yellow, followed with magenta, cyan and black, they came together and melded into one. At the Dudley shop a new all singing, all dancing AB. Dick offset printer was installed, as were the necessary equipment to produce near professional metal printing plates. When Movie Maker ceased publication in the 80’s, Derek believed that the hobby would suffer without something at it’s core, so we launched our magazine ‘Film for the Collector’, which eventually incorporated Keith Wiltons popular mini publication ‘Super 8 Film Review’. To put it mildly this was a difficult project to sustain, supposedly the magazines articles were to be those of it’s readers, but the promised articles rarely, if ever, came through. In the last 5 or 6 years of it’s life 80% was filled out with material written by either editor, the late Steve Wellings or myself. It was printed out professionally for many years, but as the subscription numbers dwindled, by 2011 they had fallen from over 1600 to around 300, this was also printed in house to keep the costs down as much as possible. The AB Dick machine was working fine, even after all those years, but in 2004/5 they ceased the production of the metal plates as the printing industry turned to modern digital processes. So we had to start using a Ricoh copier to print all the newsletters and flyers and eventually found somewhere that could print the magazine for a fee that would just make the whole thing break even.
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