Printer captures a slice of history
Sep 2 2009 by Karen McLauchlan, Evening Gazette
A STOCKTON printer is in the running for one of the most prestigious prizes in British book publishing.
If it wins, family-owned and run Falcon Press, which employs just 20 staff, will go into the British Printing Industries Federation’s hall of fame alongside major publishing houses including Simon & Shuster, Penguin, and Faber and Faber.
The shortlisted book - Isle of Wight Festival 1970: Six Days That Rocked The World - records the weekend when Woodstock was eclipsed by 600,000 fans who flooded across the Solent to hear music legends Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and The Who.
“We were the size of a small city; we were a mass of people that no police force in the world could control. If Neil Armstrong had been up there at the time, he’d have seen us from outer space,” said author and former Fleet Street photographer Bob Aylott who gathered recollections and images, including an iconic shot of a pregnant hippy in a sea of canvas tents, from colleagues who were there at the time.
Falcon won the contract for printing the 1,000 limited edition from what Mr Aylott described as “one of the biggest printers of photographic books in Italy”.
MD Mark Stephenson, who recently added a £250,000 five-colour B3 Japanese press to boost production in the company’s core non-book printing areas, said the contract had come about by recommendation, the firm having previously worked on high quality reproduction for mainly landscape photographers, including Joe Cornish.
“We do a lot of calendars and landscape photography, but we have never entered a book into a competition before. I’m really thrilled it has even got this far.”
Just over 600 copies of the book, which took seven hours to print, have already been sold through the web site www.isleofwightfestival1970.com
“After coming up to meet Mark and his team I had no hesitation (in giving them the job),” said Mr Aylott. “I knew I had made the right decision there and then. They have a fantastic team there and deserve all the credit in a super job.”
The publicity surrounding the book, which was published to co-incide with the Festival’s 40th anniversary next year, couldn’t come at a better time for the printing house, which said margins had been squeezed mercilessly by rising paper costs and a drop in spending.
