I’ve spent so much of my professional life working with ink that it feels like part of me now.

I’ve always felt like I have printer’s ink mixed with the blood in my veins.

I began as a rookie journalist aged 17, in Dundee, working on a romantic fiction magazine for older women.

It was printed on hot metal presses: a technology which, even then in the mid-1980s, everybody knew was fast disappearing.

I was the “Case Room Boy”. An archaic but oddly affectionate title for the part of my job that involved going upstairs from our third-floor editorial office to the Case Room on the fifth floor to collect galleys: long strips of paper carrying columns of freshly set type waiting to be proofread.

The paper was warm. The ink still glistened.

The Case Room was no place for anyone easily fazed. It was noisy, smelled of hot engine oil and melting lead, and the boiler-suited compositors who worked there took great pleasure in terrorising trainee journalists. One of their favourite tricks was to flick tiny spits of hot lead onto the backs of our jackets where they’d leave little scorch marks.

You made your own entertainment in those days.

“At one stage in my career I wielded editorial control over more than 100 magazines, amounting to around a quarter of a billion printed copies a year.”

And, oh God, I loved it all.

The language around it: stone subbing, ems rulers, mark-ups, cases. The industrial quality of the process. The sheer physicality of words appearing on a page.

I especially loved it because my great-grandfather, James Phillip Buik, had worked as a compositor for the same company sixty years before me. He was a union man and walked out during the General Strike of 1926 while many of his colleagues stayed. He never returned.

The thrill of printing never really receded for me after that first exposure to it.

I spent decades writing for, editing and publishing media that ended up rolling off giant presses somewhere in Britain or abroad. At one stage in my career I wielded editorial control over more than 100 magazines, amounting to around a quarter of a billion printed copies a year. Later I ran a newspaper business distributing roughly 200 million copies annually.

I visited paper mills and countless printers over the years and always marvelled at the scale and precision of it all. The noise. The speed. The choreography.

Then eventually I stopped running print media businesses and assumed, more or less, that my relationship with print had reached its natural full stop.

But all those old feelings came rushing back last week when I visited CPI, a printer in Chatham, Kent, to watch my own book, Next Gen CEO, coming off the presses.

This sprawling factory prints and finishes around 400,000 books every single day.

Parts of the process are heavily automated. I stood beside a giant web offset press while pages thundered past at extraordinary speed just inches from my ears.

Other parts remain surprisingly human. If you’ve ever bought a book with sprayed edges, that was definitely done by hand. I watched people patiently inserting signed leaves into hundreds of books one by one as they moved along the line.

And then came the moment where the 408 pages of my book were trimmed, glued fast into the hard cover with its silver-foiled spine, and wrapped in the black, white and fluoro magenta dust jacket I’ve been staring at on screens for months.

How did I feel?

Exactly the same as I did at 17.

Still thrilled by it all.

And in the old compositors’ spirit of mischief, I nicked a moment for myself. I lifted a single copy from the line, signed it by hand, and laid it back among the others as they rattled off towards warehouses and bookshops I’ll never see.

So somewhere out there is one completely random copy of Next Gen CEO with my signature hidden inside it.

If you happen to find it one day, let me know.

I’ll trade you for something even rarer: one of the three original printer’s proofs they gave me.

Best, Mike