Bill Selph, owner
I’ll share with you my history with flipbooks. I would imagine that they have been around since maybe the 40′s or 50′s. In those days, flipbooks would have been made on an offset press with each sheet collated by hand. Much more labor intensive than the variable data type printing we use today. As a matter of fact, it’s only been maybe the last 5 or 6 years that we could produce them in an efficient way.
I first saw a flipbook at Peter and Karen Cronin’s place. The Cronins have always had fun and unique ideas. Karen had some really old flipbooks that she had saved for years. One was of Elvis Presley. These books would surely have been assembled by hand.
“When Bill saw Karen’s flipbooks, his eyes lit up and you could almost see his printer’s brain kick into action,” Peter says. “He found a practical and affordable way to get them printed and into the hands of people everywhere. Bill’s “Me Having Fun” flipbooks are just amazing.”
That meeting started my obsession with flipbooks. Marshall & Bruce Company had the technology to produce these books, I just needed to figure out the front-end. Our partner from Xerox introduced me to a man who had been doing this for several years. He had already figured out the processing, so we struck a deal and started making flipbooks.
We can produce a single flipbook from a 10 or 15 second video for under $15.00. Ten years ago, that book would have cost $500.00 and you couldn’t shoot the video on a cell phone. I wonder what we will be doing on our cell phones 10 years from now?
