Book printers to feature on Inside the Factory show

Paddy McGuinness and Cherry Healey visit a Suffolk factory producing three million books every week as part of the BBC series Inside the Factory

The biggest single site book production operation in the UK is set to have a starring role in an episode of the BBC series Inside the Factory.

Clays of Bungay printed more than 167 million books last year on its 14-acre (5.7-hectare) site in Suffolk.

The show, due to be broadcast 28 January, will feature presenters Paddy McGuinness and Cherry Healey visiting the factory to find out how staff make 20,000 hardback copies of Pride and Prejudice.

Clays printing general manager David Hancy hosted the visit from McGuinness and Healey who told him they were impressed by the scale and speed of operations.

The 'Hardback Books' episode of Inside the Factory will feature Clays of Bungay and is set to be broadcast 28 January

Clays sales director Vicky Ellis-Duveen said: "It was great to have the Inside the Factory team on site, and to see what takes place behind the scenes during the making of the show.

"We are honoured and thrilled to have our company featured in the programme and it was brilliant to show the size and the speed of the operation we have in Bungay.

"It also allows us to highlight the meticulous process behind the creation of these beautiful books, while also offering viewers a broader understanding of the intricacies involved in book manufacturing as a whole."

Established more than 200 years ago, Clays said it was recognised as a market leading book production specialist, employing around 800 people.

In the episode, staff at the factory are shown making a clothbound classic hardback edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice being produced for the publisher Penguin.

A spokesperson for the BBC said: "While Paddy helps to prepare the paper for printing, Cherry learns how the 480 pages of Pride and Prejudice are prepared for the printing press, with specialist computer software arranging the text into something called an imposition.

"The next step is to transfer the imposition to a large aluminium printing plate. Cherry helps to load a blank plate into a specialist machine which uses a laser to bake the words of the book onto the metal.

"Paddy is staggered by the size of the printing press: 18 metres long, 6 metres tall and weighing a hundred tonnes."

A total of ten printing plates were produced which transferred the ink on to paper in the printing press, forming the 124,713 words of each copy of the book.

Elsewhere in the episode, Cherry Healey visits an optician to understand how our eyes read the text of a book and historian, Ruth Goodman, discovers the tale of a young boy called Louis Braille who helped to transform the lives of people with sight loss.

The episode is due to be broadcast on BBC One at 20:00 GMT 28 January.