After eight years of printing at Brown Printing Company, I finally took a trip to tour their Waseca, Minn., plant. It was impressive to see the technology that Brown is using to print magazines from 30,000 print runs to 5 million print runs. Global Traveler (with a run at just over 110,000 copies) fits right in the sweet spot of Brown’s capabilities. Magazines like Departures and Town & Country also print at Brown, with more complicated runs and split distributions. The automation of the plant is really a must-see. It is sprawling and everything is connected through the use of robotic transporters that pick up, warehouse and return jobs to and from various aspects of the printing, binding and distribution process. At any given moment, more than 30 robots are programmed to their location through a “traffic controller.” You can imagine the hustle and bustle these little fellas create as they move back and forth beeping and blowing their horns as they make one maneuver after another. For example, as Global Traveler‘s signatures (A signature is a term that refers to a printed grouping of pages. Pages are printed in 8s, 16s, and 32s; these pages are printed together and then folded; later they are glued with the cover to make GT) come off the web presses and fill a shipping skid, the “traffic controller” is alerted by the weight that the skid is ready to be picked up. Each skid has a bar code to indicate what it is and where it should go. The robot picks up the ready skid of GT signatures and then takes it to a central control area. Here the skid is scanned and the location for the drop-off is told to the robot. Off he goes to store the skid for future use or take it to the bindery to be made into another great issue of Global Traveler. While I was touring Brown, Global Traveler‘s 100th issue was printing. These robots are whizzing around the plant while other robots are taking signatures from the printer and creating skids for robotic pick up. Giant rolls of paper, which represent about half of the total production costs of GT, arrive via truck from our paper supplier, Clifford Paper. The rolls are added and changed “on the fly” as they are depleted. The presses glue the ends together at speeds that NASA would be envious to achieve. Web breaks happen when a paper rips, sending it flying  . . . less likely with Brown’s modern web presses. The pre-press work at printers has been reduced by technology. No longer does a team of “strippers” create plates. Now, pages come ready for direct plate technology. Negatives are made from the pdf files Global Traveler provides and are etched right to plates that are later bent to fit the desired press. A plate is made for the four primary colors for each page. We often review our printing needs, but we always seem to circle back to Brown for their customer service, quality and pricing. They happen to be a great bunch of people, too. — Fran Gallagher, publisher and CEO