BonnerSprings.com

You could say printer's ink runs in Jeff Vile's veins. But it would probably be an exaggeration.

Still, the owner and operator of Nationwide Discount Printing, 109 E. Second St., does have an uncle who hit it big, printing for Hallmark and other clients, and his brother, Bob, started Nationwide.

Vile worked with his brother when he opened a printing shop in Olathe then left the business to work as an outside sales representative for a travel agency.

He came back to the business about six years ago and bought it last March when his brother left to teach full-time.

"There's a difference between an avocation and a vocation," Vile said, and travel is where his real interests lie.

So Vile's office in the back of the store also serves as his base for a travel-consultant business, All World Travel.

"I do anything - tours, cruises and airfare," he said. "I just sent someone to St. Thomas."

Also, Vile has developed and copyrighted software that serves as a kind of meta-index for different kinds of travel Web sites.

It's the printing business that takes up most of the building, with two color copiers in the front and printing presses in the adjacent space next.

The printing business itself hasn't changed as much as one might expect, Vile said.

While the process for creating plates by which images are transferred to paper has changed greatly in recent years, printing presses themselves have not.

Now, plates can be made directly from a computer image, which compares to the previous method, photo-direct, in which the plate essentially was a large photo negative.

While color copiers have gotten cheaper, it still doesn't make sense for most organizations, even large ones, to own or lease their own machines, because the per-copy cost ends up not being much if any of a savings, Vile said.

The quality of images produced by color copiers like the ones in Vile's shop is now pretty close to that of prints he makes using a press, and the difference lies only in the price per copy over a certain number of prints.

For certain jobs the press is faster, and for others the copier makes more sense.

"It's like an airplane," Vile said. "You're not going to fly a Piper Cub to Topeka, but you're not going to fly a 747 to Topeka either."

Over one of the color copiers in the front of the store is displayed another Vile, who made it big in printing.

Vile's uncle, Hy Vile, started the Vile-Goller Press with Albert Goller in Kansas City, Mo., after World War II, which eventually printed cards for Hallmark. On the wall in the front of the shop are photos of Hy Vile at a small gathering of men playing cards, with a familiar face in the foreground: President Harry Truman.

Hy Vile knew Truman through Eddie Jacobson, Truman's former haberdashery partner.

Before a lucky meeting with Joyce Hall, the founder of Hallmark, Jeff Vile said, "my uncle probably started handing out grocery handbills in the street."

Comments