Moto-journalist David Dewhurst’s master work is almost here, but this is your last chance to get the holeshot on a 25% discount. “Sign up before November 1st and get 25% off the retail price of the book, plus, and this is a big plus, you will automatically be invited to the celebrity launch party in Los Angeles in November,” said Dewhurst from the press check in Kansas.
“We have invited some of the biggest names in motocross history, including the greatest of all time, Roger DeCoster. We've also invited other moto royalty, including David Bailey, Broc Glover and Rick Johnson to name just a few.” The presses have rolled and the books are now in transit — all 10 tons of them — to be here prior to the launch party.
At the end of September I flew to Kansas City and made the hundred mile drive east to the tiny town of Marceline, Missouri. There's not much here in the heart of the country, but just off the main drag, right around from Marcie's Diner, is the Walsworth Printing company. It seems like most of the town works for this huge printer, except for a few that work for the Walt Disney Hometown Museum.
It's a sleepy town, but inside the huge Walsworth plant they are awake 24/7. Three shifts operate three 6-million dollar Heidelberg printing presses that crank out books at an amazing rate. Giant rolls of paper feed in one end where it is cut to size and run through eight print heads, not unlike your Epson desktop printer. The only difference is these ink cartridges are the size of a small car and are fed constantly from 45-gallon drums of expensive ink.
Each set of plates creates a 'form' that has six pages printed on either side of the paper. Once the printing plates are installed there is a short run to stabilize the ink and I have to sign off that everything looks good. Once approved it only takes about twenty minutes to print 3000 forms. Then the whole process is repeated until all 40 forms for the 480-page book are printed.
In a perfect world it should take about 24 hours to finish the whole job, but not everything was perfect. A couple of plates were messed up and had to be replaced and one machine started overheating and started spitting sheets of paper everywhere. It was a long day with no sleep, but at 6am on September 22nd the entire book was printed.
All those pages are now being cut, folded and bound into a 480-page book that will weigh approximately 5.8lbs. Do the math and you'll realize that 3000 copies will weigh 19,250lbs. or just under 10 tons. A mind-numbing figure. If all goes to plan all ten tons will arrive in Los Angeles the first week of November and will start shipping out immediately.
Pre-order before November 1 here:
