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This article was originally published in the pages of the SPS (Small Press Syndicate) news letter, and details how I was able to produce a sample blank book using the perfect bound format normally reserved to professional printing companies. It is by no means complete. Rather it is merely an introduction to the possibilities of self publishing in the Perfect binding format.
Daniel Nauenburg.
As I write this (February 10th 2001) not very long ago I successfully produced a blank copy of a trade paperback book. What that means is that I have produced a perfect bound book consisting of blank pages and a blank cover that is 268 pages long and measures 7 inches wide by 10 1/4 inches tall and is 5/8 inch thick. The page count is the number of sheets of paper inside the cover multiplied by 2. That means that 134 pieces of paper are glued inside of the cover. The cover is made of Strathmore 300 series bristol board which I had lying around. Though this blank book isn't a complete trial run with color cover, comics, and text, it does nicely prove my hunch that the small press can make trade paperback books in very small quantities using common tools available at any good hardware store. What I did to make this book was this. I borrowed a glue gun from my father. The glue gun is the one thing that makes the home made paperback book possible. What it consists of is a little pistol like device that takes transparent plastic cylinders that are designed to melt at low temperatures and heats these cylinders up until they start to melt. The glue, in it's cold, solid, form is not sticky but as it melts it acts like sap from a tree sticking to anything it touches. The glue will then cool and harden quickly. Often in as little as 30 seconds, trapping anything it has covered in a bond that isn't all that different from amber. If you look at the spine of a paperback novel you'll see this thermal glue holding the book together. Glue guns can be purchased in any good hardware store for about $25.00 and glue sticks are about $3.00 for a pack of 10. Their are 2 types of glue guns. "Hi-temp" guns and "Low-temp" guns. This refers to the temperature that the glue is heated to. The Glue Guns that are commonly available in hardware stores are usually of the Hi-temp variety. I must confess, besides on the Internet, I haven't seen a store that carries the Low-temp guns that are ideal for this kind of work, so I made due with the Hi-temp gun that I had on hand. As it turns out the Hi-temp glue guns are effective for binding books. The only thing I had to be sure of was that I used only Hi-temp thermal glue sticks, which are about the only thing available in hardware stores. I designed the cover first before doing anything else that involved actually gluing or cutting. I measured the spine of the book first because it determines how many pages I can put into the cover. Making sure I kept all my measurements as accurate as possible I then marked where the spine would be, how big it would be and then I marked all the other trim areas. I then trimmed the cover to the desired size. After trimming the cover I took a dull pocket knife and used the opposite side of the blade (the dull part) to score a pair of lines on the "inside" of the cover where the spine of the book is to be folded. The scoring is important because I had to fold the cover as accurately as possible before any glue or paper was added to it. I didn't have the luxury of machines to do the folding for me like the professional printers do. At this point, after having a trimmed and folded cover, I measured the length from the inside of the spine to the outer edge of the cover. This is done to account for any miss-measurements I may have made, and to account for the thickness of the cover stock which can throw off measurements by a small margin. Once I have the measurement from the spine to the outer edge I then re-measure the width of the book to make sure I got it right. If I get it wrong I have 2 options. Make a new cover or trim the interior pages to the new size. I choose to trim the interior pages to a slightly different size than I had planned. I could afford to do this because up to this point I hadn't trimmed any of the interior paper. Next I made a crude cutting "Jig" for the interior paper. I didn't have the luxury of a Guillotine Paper Cutter that can be bought for about $80.00 at any good office products store, so I had to go with a device that used an Exacto knife and a metal ruler. The Jig set-up was simply to stream line the laborious process of cutting paper to the desired size as accurately as possible by hand. With a paper cutter this process would be quite simple with only some minor advanced planning. Needless to say I eventually got all the paper trimmed as close to the desired size as I could. At this point the differences between a professional and an amateur become more pronounced because by hand, the cutting is never as good as the professionals machine which can trim the books in one quick movement after they have been bound. Over all doing it by hand is still not too shabby. Okay, after I trimmed the interior paper I then "Jogged" it to make it into a neat stack. What I mean by that is I made it so the individual pages were as close to evenly stacked as possible so that the outer edges of the stack were as smooth as I could make them. Because I couldn't trim the whole book after it was glued up this was important to make the book look as professional as possible. I then inserted the pages into the cover for a trial run. They fit nicely. With the pages removed from the cover, I used the Glue Gun to apply a thick layer of glue down the spine of the book making sure that I didn't go beyond the score marks I had made earlier. If you go beyond the score marks re-folding the book after it has been bound becomes difficult. I had a minor problem with staying inside of these marks which made folding it a wee bit difficult. I applied the glue as evenly as possible (which can be difficult) and then allowed it cool and harden. Once the glue has hardened I took the interior paper and placed it inside the cover again and took great care to "Jog" the interior paper into an even stack that was as flush with the edges of the cover as possible. It's at this point a common house hold clothes iron is needed. To prevent the spine of the book cover from scorching by the heat of the iron, I used a scrap of paper to cover the surface of the iron and then proceeded to heat the spine of the book so that the thermal glue would re-melt and bind the paper inside. This was a wee bit tricky to do, but after about a minute of heating the spine I had the glue melted and the interior pages glued in place. All that was left to do was to allow the glue to cool and the blank book would be complete. The end result was a semi-professional looking perfect bound book that was a bit rough around the edges but otherwise good looking. The roughness was due to my inability to trim the book after it was all bound together. Any one with access to a $1,200.00 paper trimmer that is capable of cutting as many as 500 sheets of paper in one pass could have put the finishing touches on this book and could have avoided the laborious hand trimming of both the cover and the interior paper. Lessons learned. If you are going to do this for a real finished book you will want to invest in a cheap Guillotine paper cutter to reduce your work load. (or find a way to use one of the expensive paper trimmers that the pros use) Also its a smart idea to add a 1/16 of an inch extra to the spine of your cover so you can accommodate the "Curve of the Fold" and cover paper thickness. The small curve in the fold of the cover has the potential to take the interior pages that are near the front and back cover (Outer pages such as the first and last) and thrust them outward a fraction of an inch giving the interior paper a concave look that can be un-attractive. My blank copy had a little bit of this concave problem as a result of the spine being just a wee bit too small when the curve in the fold was taken into account.
To summarize, all you need to make a blank book like I did is a glue gun with a single glue stick. A common clothes iron. An Exacto Knife and steel ruler. (Preferably a paper cutter) some scrap paper, a pencil, and the materials of the book it self.
1. Figure out how thick the book will be by measuring the interior pages and add at least 1/16 of an inch extra. And that's it. Obviously when real material like comics and text are going to be used additional considerations will be required. But this should give you the gist of it.
Links related to "Do it your self, Book Making". Bookbinding, a tutorial by, Douglas. W. Jones NEW
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