I visited with Dell over Thanksgiving, and true he has lost his lease and has to move by sometime around March. His Heidelberg KORD has been sold (to a dealer for shipment to Mexico) as he has nowhere to move it, and digital affects only his immense file of stripped up negs for traditional offset plate making. He could produce a calendar from digitally scanned material, and a number of service bureaus still make film negatives that can be processed from digital files (this has nothing to do with Eastman Kodak--I have several sources of film negatives that we use on a regular basis), so he could have continued but has also faced a steady decline in calendar sales. If you have been to the Broadway location, you'd understand how Dell has managed every square inch of space to the best use, and what an immense task he has ahead of him and Rose to move out.
Ironically, his former space in the Silverton depot is much as he left it except for the downstairs museum display area. In all these years since he left Silverton, the upstairs and darkroom areas are much the same--and he could move in without too much effort, and the building would even be decorated with a railroad theme. But, alas, Dell shares the same malady the rest of us older folks have and that's age and running out of steam. Plus, someone else owns the building. He's been doing this all these years and he's now past retirement age, but I hope he can continue in some sort of publishing efforts, even if it is crappy digital stuff.
Dell actually operated the press for the most part on all the books printed at Sundance, and he has on occasion farmed the work out to other printers. He is also faced with no case binding capability any longer in Denver, or the entire state of Colorado, so books have to be shipped out of state to be sewn and made into case bound books. The last production case work was done at Johnson Publishing in Boulder, but Jerry Johnson told me that it is not feasible to do the work anymore with limited books being published, and that much of the work has moved to Asia. More than you wanted to know, but there are complex reasons that make it difficult for small publishers like Dell to continue in the market today. I was hoping that he'd reach Volume 20 on the RGS series, but maybe not now.
