C.H. Beck Combines Tradition with State-of-the-Art Technology – with an Alegro Leading the Way

Because the print runs are permanently declining, requiring shorter setup times, printing house C.H. Beck in Nördlingen, Bavaria, has replaced the Bolero with an Alegro also coming from Müller Martini. “The new perfect binder fits in perfectly with our concept, as it enables us to offer our customers high-quality dispersion perfect binding that ensures perfect layflat behavior, even with small print runs. No other perfect binder in this segment can do that,” says Sebastian Birzele, Head of Bookbinding.
 
Not many graphic companies can look back at a 261-year history – one of them is printing house C.H. Beck. Founded in 1763 by Carl Gottlob Beck, and named after his son and successor Carl Heinrich Beck, the C.H. Beck Group, which also includes a publishing house, is currently run by the Beck family in the seventh generation.
 
Specialist for lightweight products
They transformed printing house C.H. Beck into a state-of-the-art system service provider for media solutions. “We offer our customers complete services, from typesetting, to printing and electronic media, all the way to logistics. In print, we’re specialized in the processing of lightweight stock paper all the way down to 28 g/m², among other things,” says Sebastian Birzele (image top left, next to Ralph Zängerle, Regional Sales Manager Müller Martini).
 
A majority of customers – specialist publishers, churches, trade publishers and industrial customers – are from Germany and German-speaking countries. “Thanks to our expertise in the processing of lightweight products, we also produce a lot for other countries in Europe. We’re active worldwide, as we ship religious titles especially all the way to South America and Africa,” emphasizes Sebastian Birzele with pride.
 
Extensive Alegro line
Working in two to three shifts, 300 employees at the Nördlingen factory run a state-of-the-art machine park, including an Alegro from Müller Martini. The perfect binding line is extensively configured: 24-station gather machine 3694 with signature detector Asir 3, delivery Universo (for pregathered products that are thread-sewn), book block feeder with Solema Autoload (for creating thread-sewn or auxiliary glued digital print book blocks), endsheet feeder, PUR nozzle, two cold emulsion glue PVA with IR drying, mull and lining station, drum UAL, HF drying, pressing, delivery with book counter stacker CB18 and Solema Cruiser delivery before a special drying cabinet, delivery in Kolbus palletizer or the inline drying cabinet (for curing the cold emulsion glued books before trimming and to reduce expansion), splitting saw, three-knife trimmer Orbit, front trimmer FA 650, BVM foiling and palletizer. The Alegro replaced a Bolero from Müller Martini commissioned in 2009.

Check out this video and learn about the benefits that the Alegro perfect binder offers printing house C.H. Beck in its day-to-day work. Watch the distinctive little “Reclam” books being produced live.

The Alegro fits in our concept perfectly
“One of the main reasons for our investment was the permanently declining average run volumes,” says Sebastian Birzele. “With the Bolero, in some cases we were no longer able to manage lower-volume runs economically. By contrast, the Alegro fits in perfectly with our concept, as it enables us to offer our customers high-quality dispersion perfect binding, even with small print runs. No other perfect binder in this segment can do that!”
 
C.H. Beck processes virtually its entire range of products on the Alegro. Both softcover and book blocks for hardcover (final production on a BF 527 book line from Kolbus) – from both digital printing and offset printing. To Sebastian Birzele’s satisfaction: “Our expectations in terms of performance were fully met. If the Alegro were capable of producing even thicker book blocks, we would probably have purchased a second one already.”
 
Performance increased by more than 10 percent
Machine operators appreciate the easy, intuitive handling and central control options of the Alegro. Capturing all relevant book measurement data for the entire perfect binding line, the Book Data Center (BDC) in particular provides valuable services.
 
The greatest benefit of the Alegro according to the head of bookbinding is its fast setup times. “Thanks to the high degree of automation, we can manage even extensive changeovers, for example from lightweight softcover to thick hardcover products, in next to no time. At the same time, thanks to the unique configuration of our machine, we are able to process two different jobs at once. While we’re pregathering a book block for thread sewing on the gathering machine, on the perfect binder we can simultaneously process digital printing jobs via the book block feeder. There are days we produce 15 to 20 different orders on the Alegro. Compared to the Bolero, we increased our performance by more than 10 percent, helping us to strengthen our position on the market.”
 
Partner to Reclam for many years
One of the strengths of the family-run business is responding flexibly to trends in the areas of hardcover (about one-fifth of the volume) and softcover, depending on its customers’ requirements. The softcover product portfolio is very wide-ranging. One of the main products is the classic fiction paperback.
 
C.H. Beck is a longstanding partner to Reclam, producing all offset print runs of the titles from the Reclam Universal library, often only 2-mm-thick featuring their distinctive yellow covers, in two-up production ever since 2022.
 
Digital printing on the rise
In the area of softcover products, the smallest print run is one copy, while the highest is regularly around 120,000, with an average of around 3,000. The printing house prints on three offset presses and one digital web press. Offset printing currently still dominates. Five years ago, the share of digital volumes was about half of what it is now. Because the market is undergoing a massive transformation, Sebastian Birzele assumes, “that we’ll be generating the majority of our sales from digital printing in five years.”
 
Today, the business in Nördlingen already prints runs of over 3,000 copies digitally. “For us, it’s important that our customers don’t notice any difference in quality (both in terms of printing and binding) between products printed with classical offset machines and digitally printed products.”