Thanks for the news update Buddy! I'm not really surprised this is happening though. I've talked with people in the film/photo paper distribution business in the past and was told that the biggest problem with the film industry was the disconnect between the economy of manufacturing scale that the film industry was set up for in its heyday vs. the size of the current market. Old manufacturing facilities were designed to operate efficiently at a certain production capacity and that capacity was vastly greater than what today's market has shrunk to. Film manufacturers know they can sell a certain amount of film to the arty crowd but that figure is too low to allow for profit in the context of the big production facilities of the past. If you shrink the size of the manufacturing plants, the calculus changes. Problem was, with the world's economy in a prolonged funk, nobody wanted to take a gamble on the investment. I suppose with some evidence of an improving economy, it was bound to happen that some investors would take the plunge.
The situation is analogous to what happened in the photogravure industry (a process we work with a great deal at our printmaking studio.) As commercial printers abandoned rotogravure, the production of carbon tissue shrank every year. Finally Macdermid Autotype, the last large scale producer of carbon tissue called it quits a few years ago. All the remaining fine art studios using the process bought all the remaining stocks and put it in their freezer chests and we hoped for the best. Sure enough, after a few years, smaller production facilities have popped up and their are some new sources for new production carbon tissue (at much higher prices than in the past though.) Capitalism, like nature, abhors a vacuum!
