Commercial printing in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Eden Prairie is corporate and technology offices, and the work that comes with them is trade-show and sales collateral — sell sheets, spec books, coil-bound manuals with tabs. Coil binding lies flat on a table, which is why manuals get bound that way and catalogs do not.

Coil binding is the right answer more often than people expect. A coil-bound book opens flat on a bench and folds all the way back on itself, so a manual can sit next to the thing it describes. Saddle stitch will not do either of those.

Saddle stitch has its own logic. The pages are printed on flat sheets that are folded into signatures, nested, stitched through the spine and trimmed, which makes it fast and cheap, and also means the page count has to come out in multiples of four.

Around the bound piece sits the loose collateral: one-sheet sell pieces, spec sheets, the things that go in the bag at a show. Those run short digital or long offset depending only on how many you need.

What runs here

It is one floor for all of it: offset printing in process and spot color, digital printing for the short runs, prepress and direct-to-plate, bindery, and direct mail. What comes out of it is on the products page; what it comes off is on the equipment page.