Our Business
The early days
In 1967, Mr. André Létourneau decided to launch a library-binding business in the Laurentians area, north of Montreal. After having worked in a print shop in Montreal, he was ready to head back to his roots and settle his family in this beautiful region. He had taken binding classes and decided to take a leap of faith and open a binding workshop at his family chalet, which had been transformed into four-season home. There, he would set out to do business with libraries in and around the Montreal area.
The following year, both his brother and his brother-in-law, Lionel Caron, came on board. The business was growing, and to his great satisfaction, he and his team’s work was beginning to produce results. In the summer of 1969, André bought a lot and had an 1,800 square foot building erected to keep up with the growing demand. Les Reliures Caron & Létourneau was officially born.
Following three subsequent expansions, Mr. Létourneau decided to sell the business in the mid-1980s. At this time, Mr. Normand Durand, his niece’s husband, and his cousin stepped on board.
Our Business
Today
Our company is built on an alliance between two large library-binding companies that were founded over 50 years ago: Les Reliures Caron & Létourneau Ltée represents our workshop in Labelle, Quebec, in the Upper Laurentians region.
Reliure Travaction (1991) Inc. is located in Drummondville, Quebec, and was founded in 1971. It was acquired by Mr. Durand in the 2000s, after the two companies had battled for business for over three decades.
Today, the Durand sisters, Maude and Mélissa, have taken over the business from their father. They work hard alongside our dedicated staff to fulfill our customers’ changing needs. To do so, they combine the expertise of our two workshops to maximize our technical and logistic efficiency. Today, they operate a space totalling over 25,000 square feet.
Our customers include municipal, university, college and educational libraries, along with hospital, legal-studies, governmental and public-administration libraries, genealogical societies, printing shops and individuals.
Our businesses serve a large portion of the Province of Quebec, along with parts of Ontario and the Maritimes. In fact, on a few occasions, our expertise has also been sought abroad.
Our team is here to serve you, be it to repair and restore used volumes, provide the durable finish that new volumes need when they are used in libraries, bind monthly magazine and journal volumes into single or multiple volumes, and even to suggest tailor-made solutions to problems with traditional paper documents.
To further assist our clients, we even created another business that sells repair and solidification equipment for books – Reliures D.S.M. If your binding budget is limited but you still want to give your books a makeover, Reliures D.S.M. sells everything you need to improve the appearance and durability of your volumes. In fact, we sell the same equipment that is used by our two binding businesses to solidify our clients’ books. We are able to offer highly competitive prices thanks to our strong buying power.
Today, our 3 businesses employ over 40 people, all of whom work hard to create small miracles with your books or to help you do it yourself using the training that we offer and the repair equipment that we sell.
Surprising fact: if you add up the total number of years of seniority that our employees in our 2 workshops have, it adds up to more than 600 years of combined experience.
At Reliures Caron & Létourneau, Reliure Travaction and Reliures D.S.M., your books will be in the hands of our qualified craftspersons who are dedicated to protecting the print heritage in our libraries.
Our business...
Our mission
In this digital era, our mission is to provide better access to print literature by offering our book-binding and document-treatment services. We also provide repair supplies to help libraries extend the life of their paper-based collections and continue lending.
In recent years, we have heard a lot of questions about the future of print materials. We believe that the digital revolution has in fact forced printers to adapt in order to continue to compete with electronic books and the Internet. They have made every effort to cut the costs of printing and binding to keep paper books competitive. They have managed to do so, but are neglecting the quality of bindings, which can become fragile when used in libraries by multiple users. Our challenge is to continue to find new solutions that keep print materials on the shelves in spite of these cuts.
Where print shops cut costs, binders need to use ingenuity to find a way.
Please help us overcome these ongoing challenges by sharing your comments with us…