Checkmating the Competition

Competing in a global competition against its peers in North America, Black Box Collotype of Chicago cemented its reputation as a high-end printer of fine art books by being named "Millennium Sappi North American Printer of the Year" at an awards banquet held last fall at the Palace of the Lost City in Sun City, South Africa.

Sappi Limited, a fast-growing producer of coated woodfree paper serving customers in more than 100 countries, received upwards of 3,000 entries in the North American portion of its annual global competition. In a judging completed last spring, Black Box Collotype won the gold award in the books category for En Passant, black-and-white photographs by Dennis Manarchy.

In the final printer-of-the-year competition held in South Africa, Black Box competed against the five other North American gold winners—which had won in the categories of annual reports, brochures, magazines and journals, catalogs, and general—and won.

En Passant, which Black Box Collotype printed for Chicago-based Paper Mirror Press, is a collection of Manarchy's stark close-ups of manly boxers, nude men and women, smiling couples, and circus workers.

"Black Box Collotype rose above all the North American gold winners," according to Sappi's international panel of judges, "for its innovation and technical excellence displayed in the printing of En Passant."

In the view of Black Box technical director Michael Intrator, one of the secrets to En Passant's success is Sappi's coated 80-lb. Lustro Dull paper. "It's one of the finest sheets of paper ever made," says Intrator. "I've used Lustro Dull many, many times over the years. It prints beautifully."

For the creation of En Passant, Black Box utilized a menagerie of prepress production hardware, including an Isomet 455 custom-made scanner and an ALR computer (whose previous home, says Intrator, was a weather bureau) loaded with Photoshop software.

Proving that advanced equipment age does not restrict quality, the company used a four-color, 28x40" Heidelberg Rotaspeed sheetfed press—dating from the Watergate era, or about 1972—running Howson photopolymer plates from Agfa. "They are super, pure aluminum plates," says Intrator. "They're very soft, 12 gauge, and one-sided."

For the project, Black Box Collotype utilized its own proprietary "Advanced Continuous Tone" process, which "produces an extended monochromatic range," and a special, high-resolution ink from Toyo Ink, Chicago, which Intrator affectionately named Manarchy Black.

Black Box printed 5,000 copies of the 102-page oversize 12 3/8x12 3/8" book, which was bound by Roswell Bindery, Phoenix.

"The final result was excellent," says Paper Mirror Press publisher Bob Sosin. "In producing the book, we broke tradition with convention in that we dropped out highlights in the photographs' extreme ends. Conventional printers aim for 5% to 10% tone in the highlights of a picture, but with En Passant, sometimes we had zero percent tone in the highlights."

According to Manarchy himself, "In the book, some of the photographs—the older ones—are better than the originals in terms of their tonality. The printed photos are more dramatic, with the whitest whites, blackest blacks, and a subtle gray rendering. Everyone is really impressed."

Intrator concludes, "We wanted to do something that would knock people over, make them say, 'I've never seen anything like this in my life.' "

According to Sappi and the competition judges, Black Box Collotype achieved just that.