Page 36 - Print21 Nov-Dec 2019

Commercial Printing
Patrick Howard
The making of a
‘real’ print company
Ambition is a trait best seasoned with determination and commitment. For Emmanuel Buhagiar the road to being numbered among and recognised by his chosen peers in the printing industry began almost 50 years ago, when he started as a hot metal Linotype compositor under mentor John Kidd. His ambition was always to own a ‘real’ printing company, a B2-size commercial operation that could match it with the best in the industry. With his investment in the first Konica Minolta AccurioJet KM–1 in NSW he appears to have arrived. Patrick Howard went along for the barbie.
The creative destruction of printing technologies is a path littered with many casualties, with the legacies of defunct
systems and the obsolescence of
once innovative methods. Skills
and valued experience acquired
by practitioners over many years
are condemned to redundancy overnight as the technology behemoth rolls on. It’s easy to find yourself on the wrong side of history; character-building to recognise the inevitability and move on.
The list of printing technologies that makes up Emmanuel Buhagiar’s depth of experience is a potted history of the industry’s digital revolution. From starting as an apprentice compositor in Surry
Hills in 1972, he has trained and re-trained, skilled and re-skilled as the printing technology landscape shifted. Along the way he was a
cut and paste film setter, a graphic artist, an art room manager, and aCompugraphic typesetter. He has worked in printing enterprises large and small – Sun Gravure, Atlas Printing, Dally Middleton & Moore and RT Kelly’s – serving his time in the trade even as its future became increasingly uncertain.
In the finest industry journeyman tradition he always nourished an ambition to be his own man, to
deal directly with customers and run his own race. After cutting his teeth with a typesetting business
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in the 1980s, 21 years ago he stepped up to create Imagination Graphics as a prepress and design business in Marrickville. Now with the installation of the first Konica Minolta AccurioJet KM–1 in NSW, he is transforming it into a full service printing business.
Changing dynamics
Lunchtime at the Imagination Graphics factory in Sydney Road, Marrickville, sees Emmanuel Buhagiar laying on his signature barbeque for staff and customers. This October Friday he has the Konica Minolta installation team here, installing the big B2 inkjet press. Working the busy barbeque he’s the archetype of a successful and accomplished commercial printer. Happy to attribute reasons for his success to a number of significant people and events along the way,
he immediately acknowledges his wife, Colleen. Their partnership, business and personal, has stood the test of time since the 1990s, a vital contributing factor to the familiar, friendly, people-oriented company of today. An earlier milestone
came when having retrained as a typesetter under Mike Webb at RT Kelly’s, he recognised the changing dynamics of the industry and went out on his own for the first time.
“Everyone was looking for good typesetters, so I started Aaron Paul’s Typesetting. I just thought
it had a ring to the name. I bought
a Compugraphic and set up in my garage. It went very well. I ended up having seven employees typesetting in an office on the Princes Highway. We were doing a lot of work for Link Printing, a lot of work for URI, a bit for Bridge in the day, and my own clients.
“Then we had the big crash in the 1990s. I had a couple of bad debts, clients stopped coming. Printers went down and I lost a little bit
of money. It was a bad time, but I didn’t go broke. I paid off everyone, employees and suppliers. I never phoenixed,” he says with grim pride.
Over the next few years he was head down and hard at it, operating from home. He employed one typesetter. Then in 1998, after meeting Colleen, he began to dream again.
“I remember 1998 very well, because it was that year basically that I had this idea, because we were starting to grow again and I had such a good feeling about the industry.”
“This is a lucky
building for me”
He identifies the Imagination Graphics building where the Konica Minolta AccurioJet KM1 is now installed as a significant site, a ‘lucky building.’ He was doing typesetting for the occupier, Staas Printing, when he recognised the emerging opportunity in digitally imaged film. He proposed a joint investment in an Agfa imagesetter