Johnson celebrates 50 years

BOULDER — In January, 1946, Raymond Johnson asked his nephew J.K. Emery to help him pick up a printing press in Denver.

Johnson was quitting his job managing the Boulder Daily Camera’s commercial printing operation. He purchased a Price & Chandler hand-fed platen used to print letterheads, envelopes, announcements and small business forms. He also purchased a Linotype, a Babcock hand-fed press and a folder. By February, Johnson and his wife Ada opened their new business, and Johnson Publishing Co. was rolling out pages at a small barn converted to a garage at their North Boulder home.

Johnson Publishing Co. celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and the original Price & Chandler press, well used but spotlessly clean, stands in the lobby at the company’s headquarters in Boulder.

Johnson always wanted to print his own newspaper. “He bought a newspaper in Englewood when he was just out of college,” said Johnson’s son Jerry, now president of the company. “He went to college here at CU and majored in journalism. He always wanted to own a newspaper.”

But plans change along the way. The business began growing rapidly so just two years after he started, Johnson purchased the building at 839 Pearl St. Ninth Street did not exist between Spruce and Pearl streets at the time. Five additions were made to the building in the 1950s and three more in the 1960s until the Pearl Street location was expanded out as far as it could go.

Then in 1978 the 80,000-square-foot headquarters was built in Flatirons Industrial Park to house the rapidly growing publishing company. It stands as a tribute to a family that spent 50 years fine-tuning their business. But their early roots in the small barn looked a bit chaotic to the young Emery as he surveyed parts of presses all over the garage floor when he and his uncle delivered the press to the small barn.

Emery said in his short history of the company, “Inside the garage, I looked at the pieces of a massive press scattered around the floor — the disassembled gears, motor, bed and cylinder of an imposing hand-fed Babcock press. Sitting at the side was a Linotype waiting to be hooked up to electricity and a gas line. Filling up the rest of this tiny space were two composition stones, a couple of cabinets of metal type, a stitcher and a large cutter.

“This jumble was crowded into a space about one-fourth the size of a tennis court. To me the scene was chaotic. I was fascinated by the strange equipment and Ray’s excitement as he explained how the pieces all fit together in this time-honored vocation of printing. That evening (while watching) I acquired the affliction enjoyed by thousands who have ink in their blood.”

When Johnson started the business in 194, his children Barbara, Gayle and Jerry were 12, 8 and 6 years old respectively and it wasn’t long before the entire family had ink in their blood and worked as a family unit producing all types of copy. “I got my hand caught in the folder when I was 6,” Jerry said. Fortunately, no bones were broken.

The 1950s brought major changes to the industry, and Johnson Publishing centered their business around book publishing.

“The biggest change was the technology in the 1950s when offset printing came into vogue,” said Ray’s daughter, Barbara Mussil. “That was the first major change in the printing industry in 100 years. Then it evolved into phototype. This was the first change in hot type. Typesetting is really no longer a trade. Now we have digital printing.”

Johnson bought their first offset press in 1958. The company was printing books for Alan Swallow, a major book publisher in Denver. Under the primary imprints of Swallow Press and Sage Books, Swallow published many new authors including Anais Nin, Janet Lewis, Vardis Fisher, e.e. cummings, Richard Bradford and Frank Waters. JPC also printed many university publications, which fueled their expansion over the years.

In 1962 Bill Morey and Ray Johnson opened Johnson-Morey Litho in Loveland to print material for another company that was started in a garage: Hewlett-Packard Co. Morey sold his share early on and it became a division of Johnson Publishing Co.

Just when the company was riding the crest of a wave of success, tragedy struck. In 1970 Ray and his assistant manager Carl Akers were killed when Ray’s plane crashed just after takeoff from the Boulder Airport. They were on their way to deliver books in Wyoming.

“The rapid pace was just beginning to happen,” said Jerry, who became president of the company. “He had talked about slowing down.”

Ada remained active in the business for many years and still drops in to check on things at the company. Mussil, who had left the business in 1967 to purchase the Printed Page bookstore, returned in 1978 and established the publishing division of the company, Johnson Books, just as the company was moving to its new headquarters. Gayle moved to California in 1959 but remains on the board of directors.

Today the company has nine presses and 130 employees. A new web press was purchased for $2 million two years ago. “Hewlett-Packard is still one of our main customers,” Jerry said. “The biggest part of our business, 85 to 90 percent is commercial printing. We also do technical kits, manuals, and high-speed copying.” The company prints a wide variety of materials and all the

printing is done at the Boulder facility. Annual sales companywide this year are expected to be $15 million.

At Johnson Books about 12 new titles are published a year, Mussil said, adding that the company plans to expand the book publishing. The company publishes books on natural history, outdoor books, guide books, books on the West, general interest books and a special book was published for the Rocky Mountain News on the Colorado Avalanche after they won the Stanley Cup.

Although technology has speeded up production and made printing less of a hand skill and more of a computerized process, old traditions still linger at Johnson Publishing. “I miss some of the old ways,” Mussil said. “Even the smell (of ink) is different now. It seemed to be more of a craft when you knew how things worked and there was more direct involvement with the process. Our customers were of longer durations.”

Technology has brought the printing industry to an odd crossroads. “We have the ability to do better quality work and to do better color,” Jerry said. “There is the ability to do more variety and to be more creative with design and layout — so now we have more choices, but it is now more unclear as to what the future is in printing and publishing than ever before. The Internet has changed things. We now manage information for our customers — we get requests for that. The question is how much information will go on screen and how much will get printed? There is no doubt that some of our markets will go to the screen or disk.”

Many textbooks are now on-line, Jerry points out and students can print off just a few pages of a chapter. “Then you don’t need to print so many books that don’t sell,” he said. “You can print on demand, and you can save on storage space. It is scary and exciting — we have to keep telling ourselves it is exciting.”

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