Don’t know many printers on the west coast. Rice in LA would be about the only one. Know plenty of big catalog and direct mail printers in the midwest. Hennegan in OH is where something sort of fancy with sheetfed like this would have gone in more prosperous times.
Printing offshore is ... interesting. In some ways, it’s not so bad. Press proofs are a thing of the past here, but not there. Having to explain things very literally and very carefully gets old, as does paraphrasing instructions in case something gets lost in translation. You don’t get it quickly, either.
We use CDS Publications, a Kelmscott-owned company, they’re great.
They do a lot of the Apple manuals, and Army filed manuals.
We always do press checks, even though they’re at 3 am sometimes!
Their pressman, Walt, is a genius...we can tell him to pop the color, change the linescreen, angles, whatever, and he’s perfect in hopw he achieves it.
It’s sad that pressman like that are dying out in America...it takes decades to train a good pressman but the big printers are all folding or consolidating.
See ya’,
Ed