Andy Tribute’s column this week was thought-provoking as usual. He opined that an annual printing event is no longer viable and that GraphExpo should be on a different schedule.

In the 1980s (the heyday of the printing industry) there were multiple printing events. The New England show was every two years — in January! New York had an annual show at the old Coliseum, PICA had a large annual event in Charlotte, and Midwest Graphics floated around different states. Graphics of the Americas took over the Miami Beach Convention Center. The Gutenberg Festival in Long Beach was a major event. Type-X ran every year for 20 years and the Graphic Communications 3 show ran in Philadelphia for a decade. There was a show in the Pacific Northwest, plus the annual ANPA (now NAA) newspaper show. America East was a newspaper show in Pennsylvania for many years. Lasers In Graphics was Tom Dunn’s ode to excess. XPLOR drew 4,000 attendees at its peak. Jonathan Seybold started a conference, then included a small exhibit, and then a major exhibition, and finally an east and west coast version. Vue/Point was created to give vendors and their customers a voice. On Demand was later merged with the AIIM IT conference. In other words, you were never far from a printing event of some kind in either time or space.

I am one of the few people who attended almost all of these events since 1967. I am not sure this is something to brag about.