How can we print so many books here at VGR? One of the reasons is because we have some big tools.

It sounds like a mixture of a heartbeat and a steam engine as it turns stacks of bundled pages into beautiful, stapled books and magazines. It’s called a collator, and it plays a very important part in the work we do here at VGR.

Each bundle is a stack of pages called a “signature.” The signatures are printed on our presses, but they are far from ready to box up and ship out. Each stack is placed in the proper loading bin where the collator picks one up and adds it to more signatures. The conveyor goes on to pick up the cover, just before a knife trims everything to proper size. It’s stitched together with wire, and becomes the Message book that we all love so much. The books are packed into boxes and prepared to be shipped to destinations around the world.

In January alone, over one million books went through our collator. That’s an average of more than 6,340 books per hour! And that doesn’t include all the magazines, folded tracts, and bound books.