A printing and binding house on Church Street, Prince Albert. We print our own titles, sew them in sections, and sign every first edition before it leaves.
See what is in printType is set here and printed on a 1962 Heidelberg cylinder that came up from Cape Town on the back of a flatbed. Text pages are cream book wove, ninety grams, heavy enough that the ink does not show through on the reverse. Sections are sewn on a frame rather than glued, so a book opens flat and stays open on the table. Cloth comes from a mill outside Durban and the boards are cut and covered in the back room. We finish about eleven hundred books a year, which is what three pairs of hands can manage without hurrying.
2018 — Colophon prints its first title, Klipwerf, in an edition of three hundred 2019 — Sunday Times Fiction Prize, shortlist 2021 — Rapport Boekprys, longlist 2022 — Karoo Almanac taken by fourteen school libraries in the Central Karoo 2023 — Best Bound Book, South African Book Fair, Johannesburg 2025 — Three Rivers issued as a boxed set of three
Trade orders, out-of-print titles, and rebinding a book you already own.
