Sad Tale Of Another Printing Firm’s Demise

As my colleague Brian Dowling chased down rumors Tuesday of the closing of Finlay Printing in Bloomfield, we looked for other commercial printers to call.

That didn’t turn out to be easy.

In 2005, I had written about the closing of  Sweet Waverly Printing Co. in Portland, which itself had formed a few years earlier when two firms combined.  Sweet Waverly had been in talks with MagnaPrint in Enfield — but all three numbers we had for that firm are now disconnected.

Many Sweet Waverly employees went to work at Thames Printing in Norwich. Now that firm is gone.

Closer to Bloomfield, national printing giant RR Donnelley closed its Windsor plant earlier this year, idling 117 people at a plant that was, until 1996, Aetna’s in-house printing shop, with 400 people.

The trend is not new. Donnelley idled 500 people in Old Saybrook in 2002.

And so it goes, the sad story of another lost commercial printer, several of which — Sweet, Finlay, Aetna — had their roots in Hartford, and once helped define the capital city.