BY HILDA CUZCO
In the last week, four supporters of the Pathfinder Capital
Fund contributed $28,000, including one donation of $25,000
and three of $1,000. This comes on top of the successful
raising of the $350,000 needed to purchase the new Agfa
Galileo computer-to-plate (CTP) system that is now in
operation in Pathfinder's printshop. This equipment is
essential to maintaining the shop, by making it possible to
sharply reduce the costs of producing Pathfinder books.
The most recent $28,000 in contributions is a solid first step in raising the additional $200,000 toward the Capital Fund goal of $550,000. The use of this $200,000 for capital needs must be deferred for now. But it is essential to meet operating expenses, covering a serious conjunctural cash shortfall, while the shop operators work to reverse a drop in sales and cut costs by increasing productivity and reducing scrap on Pathfinder and other work - and then regenerating the capital. To date $237,000 has been collected on the total pledged. Payment of the outstanding pledges is needed to make the final payment on the Galileo due February 15.
Having the CTP system up and running for the last two months has already made it possible to reduce the costs of producing books and to release more of the socialist workers who staff the printshop to concentrate on political work in Socialist Workers Party branches and trade union fractions. The first new book that will be produced entirely with the new technology will be Capitalism's World Disorder: Working- Class Politics at the Millennium, to be delivered at the end of February. The first chapter of this new book, appears elsewhere in this issue.
The new issue no. 3 of Ny International, featuring "U.S. Imperialism has Lost the Cold War" by Jack Barnes, will also be printed in the coming months using the computer-to-plate system. The text of the previous issues of the Swedish- language edition of the Marxist magazine New International was printed in Sweden on a small press that a socialist worker there maintained, and then painstakingly collated and bound by the same volunteers who had translated and proofread it. One reason this was done in Sweden, instead of Pathfinder's printshop, was the need for final checks of pages in Swedish. CTP technology allows print-ready files prepared in Sweden, with the editors in full control, to be sent to New York for printing, freeing up many days of valuable time for members and supporters of the Communist League and Young Socialists.
All aspects of book production are aided and costs lowered using the new production methods. Workers in the bindery, where the books are folded, collated, bound, and cut, are beginning to accomplish gains from this. "The images that are imposed digitally are more exact on the sheet of text that is printed on both sides," said Peter Thierjung, who heads up the bindery department. "Plates that are generated in the CTP are more exact," which cuts the setup time and scrap on the press. The printing quality and alignment of the pages is also more uniform from one signature to the next. "When books are collated, any variation in the pages is barely noticeable, and this makes for much better looking books," he added.
The advantages in utilizing the computer-to-plate equipment can be registered in the output of the bindery machines. "The folding machine is easier to set up with very little adjustment from signature to signature" to account for the variation introduced by the previous hand-stripping method of production, explained Thierjung. This in turn improves binding and trimming the books in the three-knife machine.
Bindery operators are building on this to take on another challenge: to improve the rate of production while maintaining high quality. "We are on a rate campaign," reports Thierjung, "We want to turn out more work with high quality."
Thierjung gave an example of what such campaign can accomplish. "We received an order to ship 250 copies of By Any Means Necessary by Malcolm X for a class adoption to universities in Iowa, upstate New York, and elsewhere. They were all printed but needed finishing. We started at 11:00 a.m. and by 6:00 p.m. the same day Federal Express was picking them up for their destination. We were able to turn around books faster than before -we did the folding, collating, binding, trimming, and packing, all in one afternoon. The computer-to-plate technique gives us the ability to respond faster to demands for Pathfinder books."
To find out how to make a contribution, write to the Capital Fund Committee, 410 West St., New York, NY 10014.