Timsons Joins the Magnum Group — and Press Manufacturing Stays in Kettering

Magnum Digital Solutions has completed its acquisition of Timsons, the Kettering firm that has been building book printing presses since 1896.

Steve Fyfe, Magnum’s founder and chief executive, signed the deal with Jane Brown, granddaughter of Timsons’ founder. For Fyfe it closes a circle: he ran Timsons North America before starting Magnum in 2009.

What changes, and what does not

The works stays a works. Timsons Engineering carries on from Kettering with its own foundry, its own machine shop and roughly 60 skilled engineers. Magnum is putting money back into the site, and the apprenticeship scheme that has trained Timsons engineers since 1950 is running again.

A familiar name, a wider remit. Jon Walker moved from technical sales director at Timsons to European sales director at Magnum in January 2025.

Folding comes to Kettering. Running alongside the acquisition was a purchase of digital finishing assets from Kolbus, the Rotary FlexFold among them. It will now be manufactured at Timsons’ UK headquarters — 300 metres a minute, web widths up to 1,524mm, built for high-volume digital book production.

The market answered first. Clays, the largest single-site book printing facility in the UK, has already ordered two Timsons Zero Make-Ready presses, with further machines scheduled across 2026–2027.

Thirteen decades, pointed forward

What the group has now is 130 years of press engineering attached to a digital finishing roadmap. The presses are being built again.