Dartmouth Printing Co. Sold to Minnesota-Based CJK Group

By John Lippman

Valley News Business Writer

Published: 04-09-2017 1:01 AM

Hanover — Dartmouth Printing Co. has had eight different owners through its 224-year history.

Last week it gained a ninth.

The owners of The Sheridan Group, parent company of Dartmouth Printing, have sold Sheridan to CJK Group of Minnesota. The sale price was not disclosed.

Dartmouth Printing, which traces its roots to 1793, when it was Dartmouth College’s in-house printer, employs 240 people at its printing facility on Lyme Road in Hanover and 235 at its sister company in Waterbury, Vt., formerly known as Dartmouth Journal Services but now named Sheridan.

Despite its name, Dartmouth Printing has not had any affiliation with the college since it separated from its in-house printer in 1843.

The new owner has pledged that “all of the employees in Hanover and Waterbury will have their positions,” according to Susan Wiercinski, vice president of marketing at The Sheridan Group.

The only exceptions have been Sheridan’s chief executive officer and chief financial officer, each of whom “departed” the company following its sale to CJK, she said.

Both Pat Stricker, who overseas the Hanover printing plant, and Gary Kittredge, who oversees the Waterbury editorial services operation, will remain with the company, Wiercinski said.

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CJK Group, based in Brainerd, Minn., is a rapidly expanding, privately owned printing and book manufacturing company with operations in California, Minnesota, Ohio, and Maryland. Sheridan operates printing facilities and affiliated businesses in New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and Michigan

The acquisition of Sheridan helps to provide CJK with a “national footprint,” Chris Kurtzman, chief executive of CJK Group, said in a news release.

He said combining the two printing companies would have a “transformational effect on our organizations.” Kurtzman did not respond to a request for comment, but Wiercinski said CJK “throughout its acquisitions have allowed companies to maintain their identities.” As a result, she said, within “the next couple of weeks” the name Dartmouth Printing Co. will be removed from the side of its plant building in Hanover and the name Sheridan will go up in its place to reflect uniformly the company’s brand.

Printing companies face difficult outlooks given the shift to online and digital publishing, leading many of them in the industry to consolidate in order to grow. And Sheridan is a textbook case of the buffeting that printers have experienced over the past 10 years. Sheridan had $196.5 million in revenue for 2016, according to information it reported to trade publication Printing Impressions for the magazine’s annual ranking of printing companies.

That compares with $201.4 million in revenue it reported in 2015 and $202.3 million in 2014.

Although those recent revenue declines are relatively moderate, they nonetheless are steeply lower than the approximately $344 million in revenue the company reported in 2007, according to financial reports Sheridan filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2011 as part of a refinancing transaction.

Wiercinski said via email that the drop in revenues is partially due to the publishing industry’s shift to digital, but was also the result of “competitive pricing pressures and divesting ... some businesses during that timeframe,” including the sale in 2013 of Maine catalog printer The Dingley Press.

The Hanover printing facility specializes in “short-run” printing jobs, defined as press runs of 50,000 or below. Among the magazines it prints are Four Legs and a Tail, Kearsarge Magazine, Edible Green Mountains and Red Sox Yearbook.

The Waterbury office provides editorial support services for scientific, technical and medical journals and books.

Sheridan has been jointly owned since 2003 by the private equity firms Jefferies Capital Partners and Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co., which together acquired Sheridan for $142 million.

Sheridan, in turn, bought Dartmouth Printing Co. in 1998 from co-owners Dave Hewitt and Mike Smith. Hewitt and Smith had acquired Dartmouth Printing in 1978 from South Shore Publishing Co., which had bought Dartmouth Printing from Time Share Corp. in 1970.

Time Share Corp. owned Dartmouth Printing briefly, having purchased it from Ken Foley when he retired in 1969. Foley, in turn, had bought the former Dartmouth Press from longtime owner Frank Musgrove in 1938 and reincorporated it under the name Dartmouth Printing Co.

Musgrove, a former New Hampshire state representative and state senator, employed a typesetter named Nelson Rockefeller — who later became governor of New York and vice president of the U.S. — when he was a student at Dartmouth College in the 1920s, according to a company history on Sheridan’s website. Musgrove in 1899 purchased Dartmouth Press, which had separated from the college in 1843.

Dartmouth Press, founded to print the college newspaper, books and pamphlets as well as the Hanover Gazette, once employed another Dartmouth student, Daniel Webster, according to Sheridan. Webster was to become a famed attorney and orator, a U.S. senator and twice served as secretary of state.

John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.

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