Even Courier's earliest ancestor, The Chelmsford Journal, was quick to spot opportunities in printing and publishing. In every issue, the newspaper, founded in 1824, ran an ad for itself directly under the headline: "Book and job printing...executed on new type, with neatness and expedition, at this office." Ever since, through a series of name changes, mergers, businesses launched, developed, and sold, and the change from privately held to public company, Courier has retained its interest in a wide variety of printing and publishing markets and its eye for opportunity.

With $500, a clever salesman bought 100 years of business. One of the biggest opportunities the company spotted in its early years was telephone directories. In the late 1800s it wasn't yet clear that telephones would be big business - even though Alexander Graham Bell had been to nearby Lowell to lecture and give a demonstration phone call from Lowell to Boston. But the fledgling directory business did offer newspaper publishers a way to keep their presses running during down times; so this young salesman was annoyed to keep bumping into a competitor each time he made a sales call to the telephone company. "Look, you and I both know there ain't enough business for the both of us," he said to his counterpart, "I'll give you $500 in cash right now if you'll stop calling on these guys." The guy took the money, and Courier published the first Boston telephone directory and nearly every directory published in New England for the next century.

Courier revolutionized the forms business - just as the insurance boom took off. In the two decades after the end of World War II, the insurance industry grew at record pace, and so did Courier. By then Courier had become one of the premier forms printers in the country, having entered the business early by servicing accounts such as Western Union, American Cyanamid, Atlantic Refining, Uniroyal, United Fruit, and General Motors during the 1930s. But in the postwar years, the place to be was insurance, and the sheer size of the market - spreading from coast to coast with more than 300,000 agents receiving documents - prompted Courier to innovate new methods. The company set up systems for printing, distributing, and warehousing forms and manuals, maintaining mailing lists and inventories, and managing both random and scheduled reorders. It even created a clearinghouse for keeping Courier and its customers abreast of changes in state laws affecting the insurance industry.

As important as knowing when to get into a business is knowing when to get out. In 1988, the company's CEO tried to make a phone call from a London hotel room but couldn't find a phone book. When he called the hotel operator to complain she replied, "We are participating in an experimental computer program that no longer requires the use of telephone directories." The episode was timely since the company was trying to decide how to exercise a "trigger clause" in its contract with a partner that owned 50% of the Courier directory business. Many factors were being considered, including the cost of ongoing technology investments and the rising demands of customers, but for Courier's CEO this personal experience was the clincher. The company sold its half of the business, and just in time. Not more than a month later, AT&T Nynex began discontinuing some of its directories. The number of printed pages industry-wide dropped like a rock.

In the 1980s, Courier also got out of the forms business, which until then had been so lucrative. Computers, the company saw, would make many printed forms obsolete. So when a private investor approached Courier took it, and used the money to take an early position in the coming digital juggernaut.

New media and new markets. Electronic prepress and desktop publishing were the first signs that printing and publishing workflows were going digital. In 1990, Courier became a pioneer in the book industry when it established the Courier Connection, offering in-house imaging of film from files. Our role as a technology leader was solidified two years later with the formation of our Electronic Publishing Innovations Center (EPIC), which provided on-demand printing and binding, custom publishing services and, for the growing software market, kitting and fulfillment of manuals and floppy disks.

"Helping organizations manage the process of creating and distributing intellectual property." In the same year, 1997, Courier acquired a short-run book manufacturer and a company that resells books and products to the home schooling market. What's going on here? These days, publishers facing intensely competitive and unpredictable markets look to us for many varieties of "help." The services we provide include printing, binding, and prepress on faster and faster turnarounds. They also include fulfillment, such as taking orders online or through call centers and shipping products directly to our customer's customer. And they include helping publishers repurpose and market their intellectual properties for emerging growth markets, many of which are demanding customized content and alternative delivery mechanisms.

The move back into publishing. In the fall of 2000, Courier acquired Dover Publications, a publisher of special-interest books, bringing Courier full-circle to its origins in the early 1800s. Hailed by The New York Times as a publisher “ruthlessly opposed to pretension and in favor of editorial fun”, Dover made its mark on the industry in the 1940s as a pioneer of high quality paperback books. Today, Dover publishes over 8,000 titles in over 30 specialty categories ranging from military history to paperdolls, from musical scores to typographical fonts and from children’s books to high-end science and math texts. Dover was a long time customer of Courier and its acquisition from Hayward and Blanch Cirker was a natural step forward in Courier’s strategy. The combination of Courier and Dover creates an end-to-end publishing solution that brings books from authors to readers and allows Courier to capture revenue and profits from every step of the process.

Strangely enough, the more things have changed for nearly two centuries, the more they've stayed the same. Our success depends now, as it did then, on our ability to spot opportunities and our willingness to do something about them.