Callaway Arts & Entertainment, the publisher behind some of the most elaborate art, celebrity, and collectible books of the past four decades, recently filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code. The extraordinary part of the story is not that a publisher of $22,000 art-book sets eventually faced financial pressure. The remarkable part is that books of this ambition were produced at all.
For decades, Callaway pursued its rebuttal to the commoditization of print with unusual conviction. If ordinary information was moving online, then print had to become more tactile, more permanent, more collectible, and more luxurious. The company’s bankruptcy filing now shows both sides of that strategy. Premium print can escape commoditization, but it can also create a business model burdened by high production costs, long development cycles, expensive rights, specialized vendors, and a narrow audience of buyers.
Read this full article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
