Pinned above the second press at Hollis Bindery is a job docket from March 1994 with sums on the back of it in pencil. They are not complicated sums. A publisher had offered Bern Hollis 40,000 case-bound volumes a year, on a three-year term, at a number that would have tripled the business. The pencil works out how many presses that needs (three more), how many people (nine), and what it pays per volume (a figure Hollis has circled twice). Underneath, in the same hand: “Then what.”
He turned it down and has kept the docket on the wall for thirty-two years, which is either instructive or a warning about the sort of man he is. Hollis Bindery opened in 1979. It has fourteen employees, four presses — the oldest a German platen from 1963 that has outlived two rebuilds and one flood — and did about $3.4 million last year. It has never had a salesperson, a website worth the name, or a year in which it grew more than 9%.
What the pencil was actually calculating
The 1994 offer was good, and Hollis says so freely: thin margin but a real one, decent cash terms, and it would have made him rich enough by the standards of 1994 and of bookbinding. What the second column works out is what he would have been doing in 1998 — nine people binding volumes to somebody else’s specification, on presses bought for that contract, with a bindery whose survival depended on a publisher’s renewal meeting. “Then what” is not a flourish. It is the question, and the answer was that he would have had a factory, and the factory would have had a customer, singular.
So he went the other way. Hollis Bindery does short-run edition work, restoration, and institutional contracts — the Ballentine Library has sent its damaged folios to that building since 1987 and has never put the work out to tender, which Hollis regards as both a compliment and a liability. The average job is 340 volumes; the average price per volume has gone from $6 in 1994 to $71. Nothing in the building is faster than it was in 1994. Several things are slower.
Everybody wants to know how you scale a bindery. You scale it by binding worse. That is the whole method. It works, and I have watched four people do it, and their buildings are quiet now.
The arithmetic
The reason the bindery can be this size and still work is that the constraint is neither equipment nor demand — Hollis turns away roughly a third of what comes in. It is that a binder who can do restoration unsupervised takes six or seven years to make, and Hollis has never hired one who was already finished, because the fifty or so people in the country who qualify all have jobs they like. Every capacity decision in forty-seven years has therefore been about who was standing at the bench, and there has never been a version of the question money could answer. What that produces, in the accounts, is a company with an unusual shape:
- Fourteen people, of whom nine have been there more than fifteen years. Hollis has lost three binders in four decades, two to retirement.
- Institutional contracts are 44% of revenue and about 80% of the sleep. They renew on five-year cycles, because of individual people on both sides who will eventually retire.
- Gross margin around 52%, which is not what anyone expects from a trade this old and is entirely a function of turning work down.
- Two apprentices at a time, a number set in 1988 by how many benches fit in the light.
Trine Aas arrived at one of those benches by way of a broom. She swept the floor of that building for two summers before Hollis let her near a press, an arrangement she describes without resentment and he describes without apology. She is 34 now, she runs the restoration side, and she is the reason the Ballentine renewal in 2024 took one meeting.
Then what, again
Hollis is 68. Last year a consolidator offered him $4.1 million for the bindery, and the arithmetic of that offer is not on the back of a docket — it is in a folder his accountant has walked him through four separate times, the way you would explain a thing to someone who has misheard it. He is selling to Aas instead, for $2.6 million, payable over nine years out of the bindery’s own profits, first payment due in 2028. The difference is $1.5 million and a comfortable retirement, and he has been asked often enough to have a short answer ready.
The short answer is the docket. A company of fourteen people who each took seven years to make is not a set of assets with staff attached — it is fourteen people and a phone number, and the phone number is only worth $4.1 million while the people are still at the benches. The consolidator was pricing the bindery as though the hands came with the building. Hollis knows the hands can walk, and knows exactly where they would walk to, because she is at the third bench and would have opened her own shop inside two years and taken the Ballentine with her.
The agreement puts him on the floor two days a week with no authority and a written rule that he may not speak to a customer — a clause he asked for and then argued about. Aas intends to buy a fifth press. Hollis thinks this is a mistake, says so, and has, by his own arrangement, no vote. Whether he can hold to that is the only genuinely open question in the building, and everyone in it, including him, has a private opinion.