Gallery of Superb Printing & Ben Franklin Award highlight annual banquet
Printing & Publishing Council of New England and Boston Litho/Craftsman’s Club host event

Nearly 230 people attended the annual Gallery of Superb Printing banquet and awards celebration last month to honor top achievements from printing and graphic communication companies throughout the greater Boston and eastern Massachusetts area.

The celebration was co-hosted by the Boston Litho/Craftsman’s Club and the Printing & Publishing Council of New England.

Additionally, Duncan G. Todd was honored as the 2005 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award, the award given by the Printing & Publishing Council of New England to honor an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the industry.

28th Gallery of Superb Printing
In all, awards were presented in 72 categories ranging from calendars and self-promotion efforts to multi-color sheetfed and web printing, and specialty treatments.
Top award winners were Massachusetts-based companies Winthrop Printing Company, Boston; Kirkwood Printing Company, Wilmington; Northeast Offset, Chelmsford; and Flagship Press, North Andover.

Other multiple award winners were Morgan Press, Manchester, N.H.; The Regal Press, Norwood; Dow Industries, Wilmington; Matheson Higgins/Congress Press, Woburn; Merrill/Daniels, Everett; Deschamps Printing, Salem; Concord Printing, Haverhill; Charles River Publishing, Boston; Impressions Plus, Quincy; and Mass Envelope Plus, Somerville. Individual winners were Millennium Graphics, Norwood; Summit Press, Chelsea; The Henry Sawyer Company, Boston; Shawmut Printing, Chelsea; George H. Dean Company, Braintree; The Printing Place, Burlington and Sir Speedy Printing, Wilmington.

Boston Litho/Craftsman’s Club President Dick Derrico said entry submissions to the awards competition were up 25 percent from the previous year. A total of 23 companies submitted entries to the competition. (complete winners list)

Duncan G. Todd named 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award Winner
Todd, an account executive at Pride Printers in Woburn, Mass., joins his father Thomas Todd, as winners of the annual Benjamin Franklin Award. The elder Todd was honored in 1989. He was in attendance last month, as were several other past winners, to celebrate his son’s achievement.

The younger Todd broke into the business distributing hand type and remelted linotype slugs at the family business, the Thomas Todd Company. He eventually joined the company full time as production manager and later served as vice president and president. He has also worked at Mercantile Printing Company in Worcester, and Champagne/Lafayette Communications Inc. in Natick.

Student scholars acknowledged
Kurt Drescher, chairman of the PPCNE Scholarship Committee, acknowledged five guest scholarship students studying graphic arts in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut colleges. John Ivas introduced students from Wakefield Vocation Technical High School, winners of a poster design contest who came as guests of the Boston Litho/Craftsman’s Club.

Jim Hamilton, longtime chairman of the council’s fund-raising committee, urged those in attendance to consider contributions to the scholarship to help students pursue their dream of a career in the graphic arts.

Hamilton said $10,000 must be raised each year to maintain the $90,000 that has been awarded annually to all scholarship recipients in recent years.

The New England Graphic Arts Scholarship has a $2 million endowment, and in the past funds used for the scholarships have come from income earned from the endowment. Hamilton warned that on occasion the scholarship committee has had to use funds from the endowment to fund scholarships when donations have lagged.

Hamilton’s persuasion paid off handsomely before the night was over. Each of the three attendees who won cash prizes from an evening raffle held at the banquet, contributed part of the winning proceeds to the scholarship fund.

Lenore DelVecchio, president of Summit Press, and Ed Eldredge and Bryan Neill, both of Flagship Press, made the donations.