No Media Kings » Do-It-Yourself Book Press

Do-It-Yourself Book Press March 14, 2006

By Hamish MacDonald

Back in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. It’s all good news for us independent publishers.

The original article was called "DIY Book Production." Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that.

Generally, self-publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can save; the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it’ll cost you.

Self-pub: Four times more options than in 2000.
When I self-published my first novel, doubleZero, in 1999, I wanted to create a book to sell in stores. A big folded-over photocopy sandwich didn’t appeal to me, but I really didn’t know how else one could make a book, so I laid out the pages and the cover, then paid Coach House Press to do the production work.

There may have been other ways to do it, but having written a book about Y2K, I didn’t have the time to find out. Now, though, there are four main options available:

Offset printing
Print-on-Demand
Hand-bound hardcovers
Perfect binding

Here’s a summary of each (with special emphasis on the ones I like!):

Offset printing.

Offset printing is a high-volume printing method that uses large machinery to transfer text and images from metal plates to rubber pads then finally to paper. Coach House Press is a sterling example of a traditional press who care about their work. Their price was also the best I found — cheaper by $1,500 at the time than any print bureau.

Cynthia pipes in: I second that recommendation wholeheartedly. The moment I walked into Coach House to discuss the printing of Some Words Spoken, my nervousness dissolved. They are crafty elves who understand the feeling and flavour of books.

One of the largest parts of the printing cost is the set up of the colour press. Once it’s up and running, leaving it to print 1,000 covers instead of 500 is not that much of a difference. We printed extra covers and stashed them, so when our books sell out (!) and we need another 500, the covers are ready to go. We’ll only have to pay for the black and white guts of the book, and the binding.

The colour of the cover might shift when it goes to press. Your pretty proof from the designer might not match the final product. Make sure you get a proof from the printer and make any colour adjustments at that point. Once they’ve burned printing plates, it’s too late for you to be fussy.

Pro:	You get a lot of books. A large run of books is not much more expensive than a short run.
Con:	You get a lot of books. Expensive. In 1999, I paid $3,000 for a run of 500 books. Because of the mechanical set-up costs, a short run of books is practically as expensive as a long run. You probably don’t want thousands of books. Even 500 is an awful lot to move. It’s a one-shot deal.

What you need:

	A completed manuscript on disk, formatted the way you want it to appear in the book (or "typeset").
	A finished cover design on disk.
	Cash.

Print-on-Demand.

Newer digital printers don’t need to be mechanically adjusted to switch between jobs, so PoD publishers can print copies of work as needed.

I’m fussy about how my work looks, and the one PoD service I looked into seriously (the reputable CafePress) involves turning your pages into funny-sized PDF files and uploading them to the invisible maw of a webpage. I’m generally comfortable with Internet anything — online banking, making purchases, auctions — but I’m used to revising and reviewing and revising and reviewing until I like what I’ve created; I didn’t feel confident about what I might get from this method and took it no further. So my discussion of Print-on-Demand ends here.

Pro:

Less expensive than traditional printing.
No stockpile of unsold books.

Con:

Bookstores won’t carry them. Each has to be ordered at a retail price, which stores won’t pay. Stores also can’t return them if they don’t sell, which is the practice they’re accustomed to.
The price per book to you, the author/publisher, is often close to the retail price.
The cover templates they offer are often yeechy.
Some PoD shops promise and charge for marketing and promotion they have no intention of delivering (listing you in a vast catalogue, for instance, does not count as promotion). The way these businesses pitch themselves plays on the emotions of frustrated yet ambitious authors. For a more thorough discussion about PoD, read Jeff Yamaguchi’s "Print Non-Demand".

What you need:

	A completed, typeset manuscript on file to upload. You may need to have it in PDF format, which I’ll talk about in the "Software" section below.
	A finished cover design (unless you choose one of the publisher’s designs, which is usually cheaper).
	Cash.

Ultimately I’m happy I didn’t go this route, because instead of tying my work into a company’s PoD service I learned the following two methods, which have been a fun breakthrough in my career.

Hand-bound hardcovers.

It’s easier than you might think to create a hardcover book of your work. There are endless fun ways to adapt the handmade book process, too: For Christmas 2005 I made all my own presents — journals, photo albums, even a pop-up stage with a wee cartoon actress for a friend of mine who’s in the theatre. These were a real hit. (Don’t ask me what I’m doing next year to top it!)

Pro:	Complete autonomy: You can do it all yourself and retain complete control. Easy start-up. Can be done with common materials. Produces a result that’s personally satisfying and has a quality feel to it (a hardcover book!). Easily adaptable to a wide variety of creative projects. Hand-made work occupies a premium space in people’s minds if it’s done well.
Con:	A time-consuming process. Stitching can be tricky at first. Longer books involve some unwieldy sewing. Difficult to put your title and name on the cover (block printing, silkscreen, and Japanese Gocco printmaking kits are some options, but I haven’t tried them).

There are good explanations of the process here:
DIY Planner - Bookbinding
Toby Craig’s book assembling photojournal

To be honest, though, it took me a while to get the hang of "saddle-stitching" pages together. I found it hard to follow even the best of diagrams. I finally got it when I read Peter and Donna Thomas’s excellent Making Books by Hand.

Now that I have the hang of it, it’s actually fun, almost therapeutic, to sit and stitch a book together. Producing a novel this way, though, is not so much fun. Where my wee book of short stories or a journal contains ten or twelve "signatures" — sewn-together groups of pages — my third novel makes up twenty-six signatures. That’s a very, very long thread, and a lot of bits of folded-up paper to keep organized while sewing them together.

Here’s how to do it yourself:

For these next two sections, I’m going to divide the materials section into two options: "Minimum" and "Press". The minimum requirements will allow you to get started and learn without much initial investment, if any (depending on how much craftsy material you’ve got lying around the house). The "Press" materials are in case you decide, as I did, that you wanted to produce store-quality books at home, without having to go out and pay for commercial print shop services anymore.

What you need:

Minimum		Press
	A completed, typeset manuscript printed out.
	A finished cover design.
	A sharp blade and ruler.		A rotary-blade guillotine. Your pages will be much more even using one of these.
	Hard paper board for the covers. I was using matting board like you’d get from a framing shop until I found large grey boards in an art shop that cost a fraction of the price. Bookbinding board is available, but the board will never be seen, so it doesn’t need to be fancy. I’ve tried corrugated cardboard, but it’s too puffy; it doesn’t feel like a proper hardcover.
	An awl for punching small holes in your pages. Or you can also sink a needle into a piece of dowelling.		I use a model-maker’s drill, which is like a watch screwdriver with a 1mm drill bit, and drill through all the pages before folding them. You can also get eggbeater-like hand-drills that will accept a small bit, but I found this harder to control and snapped several bits.
	Heavy thread. You can run it across beeswax to make it easier to work with and less likely to tangle.
	Paper. Regular copy paper will do, or you can use an ivory stock for an antiquey look.
	Heavy paper or paper-backed cloth for wrapping around your cover. Ordinary cloth can work but lets the glue leak through, which looks spermy.
	PVA Glue. I thought this must be something special when I bought it from a paperie, then discovered is the same old stuff that we peeled off our hands as kids.
			A bone folder. This helps you make sharp creases in your pages. More and more art supply shops have bookbinding materials like these.

How I do it:

	Print out the book. (More on this in the "Software" section below.)

	Cut the pages in half (I prefer to make smallish books).

	Fold the top sheet in half to see where the spine is, secure all the sheets together with bulldog clips, then drill four holes along the spine of the pages. If it’s a really thick stack, I break it into smaller chunks, because the drill can go off at an angle or not get all the way through. You can also just use an awl to punch holes through your pages. Make one mock-up page as your hole guide and use it on smaller groups of pages.

	Fold the pages with your finger, or bone folder.

	Group the folded pages into stacks of pages, no more than five or six pages per stack.
	If you look at any hardcover book in your house closely, you’ll probably find that it’s made up of folded-over groups of pages like this. These are "signatures". If all the pages were just stacked and folded over, they’d bulge out in a U-shape on the right-hand side. Using smaller groups of pages, or signatures, prevents this.

	Sew the first signature: in the first hole, out the second hole, in the third hole, out the fourth hole. This makes Signature One.

	Sew the second signature so it’s joined to the first: into the first hole of Signature Two, out the second hole of Signature Two, back into the second hole of Signature One, out the third hole of Signature One, back into the third hole of Signature Two, out the fourth hole of Signature Two… …And so on. (This is the bit that takes practice and is difficult to describe. Others do a better job; see the resources above.)

	Once all the signatures are stitched, tie the two ends of the thread together, clamp the pages between two hard pieces of board with the spine sticking out, and glue the spine fairly heavily with glue. Leave this clamped together and put it aside to dry.

	Cut two pieces of board, each the same size as one of your folded pages, and cut a third board just smaller than the spine-width of your sewn-together signatures (which now make up a "book block"). Cut a piece of cover cloth or paper a little bit larger than the size of these boards, allowing some gutter-room between the boards since your cover will need to hinge open and closed easily.

	Cut a small bit off the four corners diagonally so they won’t bunch up when folded, brush glue on the inside edge, and tuck them in, pressing down so they stay flat.

	Cut two pieces of decorative paper the same size as your book’s pages and fold them with their fancy side facing inward. When your book block has dried, put a small amount of glue on either end and glue these "end papers" to the block.

	Smear glue on the inside of your cover and stick the outsides of your end papers to the cover. Close the book and clamp it between boards or put it under something heavy, and leave it to dry overnight. When it’s dry, open your book, separate the edges of any pages that are stuck together, and sign it!

Here’s how my books look in hardcover:

Perfect binding.
This is ultimately the same technique that any press uses to make a paperback book. It didn’t occur to me until recently that I could do this, too.

Pro:	You can, with some practice, produce a result that’s just like what people are used to seeing in stores. You are completely autonomous. It’s fast. The materials used in each individual book are inexpensive (card stock, regular paper). It’s not a one-off: Money you spend setting this up gives you the ability to do this over and over, as opposed to paying for the run of just one book.
Con:	Set-up can be expensive (if you go the route I have; it doesn’t have to be).

After years of trying to go the traditional publishing route, I wanted to jump back into the indie game and recapture the fun and proud spirit of producing my own work. Making 400-page novels using the hardcover method is so time-consuming, though, that I couldn’t reasonably charge a cover-price equal to the time spent making each one. And I want to make it easy for someone who might be curious to buy my books.

My mum stumbled across a site called Gigabooks.net, started as a project by a man named Chet Novicki, who found himself giving self-publishing advice to so many friends that he decided to make equipment and handbooks to help others self-publish. I’m wary of anything online that targets aspiring authors, but this guy is giving good information and selling quality gear. I bought a hand-binding press from him, which wasn’t cheap, especially when you add duty to it, but it’s been just the greatest boost to my self-publishing efforts.

Of course, you could make one of these yourself — or in theory, one could. I can’t, though; I haven’t got the tools or materials to do it.

Copyshop versus ownership.

From Jim: An option I used with Infinity Points, a hundred page novella I published in ‘95, was to use a copy shop. They photocopied the guts of it and I supplied thick stock, full colour covers that I got an outputting service to do from an Illustrator file.

The copy shop perfect bound and trimmed the books which ended up being 5.5×8.5 in size. 500 of them cost about $1500. However, I really had to hunt for a copy shop that would do it this cheap, I basically called every one in the yellow pages and left a message telling them the best quote I’d got and asking them to call back if they could beat it.

As happy as I was with the final product, I wouldn’t do such a high-end novella again: you can’t really price 100 page books at much more than $10, and if it’s selling in the store that means that $4 goes to the bookstore, $2 goes to the distributor, $3 goes to the copy shop and the remaining $1 is probably swallowed up by incidental costs — the copies you gave away, etc. In the best case scenario that your print run sells out you’ll barely break even.

As I mentioned before, I paid $3,000 in 1999 to have my first book printed by an offset press. I’m sure it costs more now. I’ve blown a fair amount of money in the past few months setting up a press at home, filling up my bedroom with all manner of strange equipment. But even after having bought all the "Press"-level of gear and having the capacity to do this all myself for any book I want to print, I’ve still spent about a grand less than what the print run of a single book cost (and that book is now topically out-of-date).

What you need:

Minimum		Press
	A finished cover design.		A colour laser printer to print your own covers. They’re a lot cheaper than they used to be. (Mine’s a Xerox Phaser 6100; )
	Cover paper (card stock).		Spray varnish to keep the toner from flaking off laser-printed covers.
	Printed-out inside pages.		Paper-folding machine. Instead of the hour it can take to fold the pages of a full-length novel, this machine cuts the job down to minutes. (Mine’s a Martin-Yale 7200.)
	A sharp blade and ruler.		A heavy-duty guillotine paper cutter. These can cut through hundreds of sheets of paper at once, and can make the sides of your book perfectly even and smooth.
	Contact cement.
	Some sort of clamp or frame to squeeze your folded pages between.		A handbinding press. This holds your pages together, along with the cover, so you can clamp them together tightly then glue them. (From Gigabooks.net.)

How I do it:

	Print out the book.

	Cut the pages in half.

	Fold the pages.

	Stack the pages.

	Put the pages into the press along with a printed cover. Put contact cement along the spine, making sure to cover all the page-edges, then fold the cover over the spine. Let dry.

	Fold the trailing edge of the cover paper in, or trim it off.

	You’ve got a book!

Perfect-bound copies of my books:

Joe Ollman adds: Here’s how I perfect-bind my books by hand. The cover stock must be thick enough to hold a crease. Make a creasing board with a piece of wood, xacto knife and ruler. Cut a groove a millimetre deep and wide where the creases of your cover need to be, then use a butterknife to score them. Once they’re scored they’ll fold easily and without cracking. Apply a bead of glue to the inside of the spine, insert your pages and rub it down so the contact point is made. Then stack them spine down on a bookshelf, putting pressure on the sides and the top, for an hour or so. You can leave it untrimmed (decal style) or you can go to a print shop and use their trimmer to give it a smooth edge.

For detailed instructions for perfect binding, you can also visit Chet Novicki’s site at Gigabooks.net. He’s very generous when it comes to answering questions about the process.

Software for designing and printing the pages of your book.
In my first version of this article, I said that you had to have access to the (very expensive) program QuarkXPress to do the typesetting of your book’s inside pages. I was wrong. I was working as a graphic designer at the time, so that’s what I was accustomed to using. Now, though, I’m a copywriter, and I have seen the scope of today’s word processing programs. You can do just as much to lay out your text, and more easily, in programs like:

Microsoft Word ($399, Windows, Mac)
Softmaker’s TextMaker ($49.95, Windows, Linux, Pocket PC)
OpenOffice.org ($0 — free, open-source software, Windows, Linux, Mac)

Justification and footers.
Most books have their text "justified", meaning that it’s balanced from left to right so that both margins are square. I tried to do that in Word recently and learned that the program is very bad at it. If there are only two words on a line, you end up with something that looks…

like…

…this.

Badness! So if you’re using Word, use the left justified option (straight along the left side and "ragged right"). I believe that TextMaker handles this much better.

Also, make sure to put page numbers at the bottom of your pages. This will help immensely when you’re printing and arranging them. It was really fiddly work to set it up, but I think it was worth the trouble to create separate "sections" in my books so I could just have page numbering on the story pages and not on the title page or the "About the Author" page. (In Word this is found in "Insert/Break/Section break types/Next page", then mucking about the options in "View/Header and footer" until you get the proper pages to number themselves.)

An imposing program.
One of the big stumbling-blocks for the self-publisher until recently was a task called imposition. If you take a look at the sheets of paper that make up a book, you’ll see that what’s printed on them is actually jumbled up so that when the sheets are folded together they make one continuous book. Back when I did doubleZero, the QuarkXPress extensions to do this cost a thousand dollars or more.

Since then, a company called Blue Squirrel has developed a program called ClickBook ($49.95), which will intercept any job you can send to the printer and rearrange it into books, booklets, posters, and all sorts of other formats. I can’t say enough good things about this program, because it makes something possible from home that just wasn’t before, and it makes it straightforward. (The math of working out imposition makes my head spin.)

ClickBook can now also save your whole job as a PDF file. Normally you have to be very careful about bringing all the fonts and images you’ve used along with your file if you’re going to use a print service. Nothing’s worse than seeing your favourite typeface disappear and be replaced by a system font! (Okay, perhaps trade injustice is a bit worse.)

If you’re concerned about this but won’t be using ClickBook, you can use the freeware program PrimoPDF on Windows to ‘print’ to portable files that will look exactly the same on any computer, and on the Mac (OS X) you can choose to "Save as PDF" from the Print dialogue box.

About duplexing.
ClickBook works by dividing up the pages into smaller pages and laying several of those out on a single piece of paper. You’ll also need to run the pages through the printer again to print the back of them; this is called duplexing. My first laser printer wasn’t designed for duplexing, so it smudged the sheets the second time they went through, and it often mangled a page, which is really frustrating and wasteful when it’s just one of sixty sheets of paper you’ve already printed one side of. So look for a printer that has duplexing as a feature.

Creating your cover.
When someone picks up your book, yup, it’s Judgement Day. Err on the side of simplicity when designing your cover. Not too many fonts, no garish colours unless you’re really confident that you’re making a deliberate choice others will also appreciate, and make absolutely sure that the images you’ve created or adapted for your cover are not only ones you have the right to use, but are also at a high enough resolution for print. What works on a web page will look like some blocky thing from Super Mario World if you send it through a proper printer. Your images should be more than 200 dots per inch (dpi). And, sorry, you can’t just up the numbers in Photoshop; they have to start at a high resolution.

Think about teaming up with a designer whose work you like. See if there’s anything you can do for them, and set up a clear agreement with them: How many revisions are they willing to make? Get samples of books you like or images that convey what you’re after. The more you give your designer, the more in-tune their work will be with your feeling of the book.

Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop are the leading graphics packages. They cost lots. There’s an open-source alternative called Gimp, which I really want to support and use, but like so much opensourceware it seems painfully complicated. Or else I’m just stuck in thinking modes patterned by the commercial products. There’s also a new program called Paint.NET, produced jointly by students at Washington State University and Microsoft.

ISBN and UPC: Making your book easier to sell.
The International Standard Book Number is a unique identifier assigned to books. Getting your own ISBN helps bookstores keep track of your book. It also feels damned cool when you get it, ’cause it means you’ve produced an officially real book!

When I made doubleZero, I was still living in Canada, and got wonderful help from the National Library of Canada. It was years ago, but if it’s a typical government department, the same staff might still be there until the end of time. In this case, you’d be lucky, ’cause they were great to deal with. They can set you up with your own run of ISBN numbers and provide you with the Cataloguing-in-Publication data to put on the inside cover. In exchange, they’ll request two copies of your book for the National Library of Canada archives, which is actually kinda cool to imagine (though it did make me think of that scene in the giant warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
You can reach them here.

I live in Scotland now, so it didn’t seem right to use the library’s services this time. I was also working on my cover layouts on the weekend and wanted to get my ISBNs instantly, so I went searching and found this site, where I bought mine. ($55 for one, $47 each for two, $44 for three, and so on.)

Once you have your ISBN, you can get a barcode to include on the back cover of your book. Lorie La Fata wrote in response to my original article with a helpful link to a website that will generate a barcode (or UPC symbol) for you. You can reach it here. (Many publishing services would charge you for the production of this graphic.)

A word on copyright.
Some people are so concerned about protecting their unique story ideas (even though there may only be six stories) that they liberally sprinkle the "©" symbol throughout their documents. In publishing, this is generally considered the mark of an amateur, because it insults the professionalism or ethics of whomever you’ve decided to share your work with. One copyright mark at the beginning of the book is sufficient.

How do you register your copyright? You don’t need to. The moment you create an original work, you hold the copyright to it. If you really feel paranoid, you can mail a copy to yourself or someone else and keep it sealed. The post-mark will officially place your work at a point in time.

In lieu of copyright, you might consider protecting your work with a Creative Commons license. It promotes a fairer, more modern approach to intellectual and creative property by allowing people to use and share your work according to your wishes, not the dictates of a publishing, recording, or movie corporation. When you go to the Creative Commons website, you can choose from a menu of allowable uses for your work, which will then be rolled into a license that you can include inside your book.

Freedom is yours.
More and more people are becoming frustrated with the traditional publishing industry. Getting out of that corporatised voodoo and back into self-publishing has made me excited about being an author again, given me the engaging and rewarding craft of bookbinding to play with, and opened the floodgates of my imagination: I’m not concerning myself with being "publishable" anymore, I’m getting on with being the author I am.

Now when people ask me "Are you published?" I don’t get huffy and whinge about "the state of the publishing industry." I smile and say "Actually, I publish my own work. By hand."

You can, too.

Hamish MacDonald is a novelist and copywriter who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of doubleZero, The Willies, and Idea in Stone. You can read his stories, download free e-books of his novels, and follow his blog at hamishmacdonald.com.

Last 5 posts in Do-It-Yourself

Selling Your Wares: 16 Tabling Tips - April 28th, 2008
How To Get a Book Deal Without an Agent - January 21st, 2008
How to Enjoy Conventions - August 21st, 2007
How to Become a Famous Writer - July 31st, 2007
Roll Your Own Boom Pole - October 19th, 2006

165 Responses to “Do-It-Yourself Book Press”

Douglas Johnston Says: March 15th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Very impressive, and a great all-round introduction!

dj
Neil Says: March 20th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Great article! Check out http://www.guerrilla-press.com for some more DIY bookbinding info.
Hamish MacDonald Says: May 1st, 2006 at 8:48 pm
A post script: I quickly stopped using spray varnish when I discovered that it turned my covers grey and seemed to actually dissolve the toner, making it all speckly.

Instead, I now use the porous side of glossy card stock, since I find it’s got a finer grain than regular card stock, making for a nicer print job.

I also found that trimming my perfect-bound books in the blade-arm guillotine crushed the spines, and on a few occasions led to me ruining a book that was *so* close to being finished.

Now I wrap my perfect-bound books in plain, slightly heavier paper, then put a printed ‘flyleaf’ cover around that, gluing it at the spine. Handmade work will never be perfect — maybe shouldn’t be, or what’s the point — but this process now gets rid of the biggest visual “gotchas” that used to bother me.
stool Says: May 4th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Oh my, its very consistent article. Pictures could be bigger. Thanks!
eric ellis Says: May 8th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
I actually came to this site to find ways on creating my own cd jacket and cover, autonomy of this process
in the music business even with independents is nearly impossible. I’ve yet to find any information on a alternative so I thought I’d search for DIY book publishing. The process for stiching your own book could easily be adopted by the true and faithful song writer to make a cd jacket. The problems are basically the same, “how can I make my own handmade jacket cover that looks respectable?” I’ve seen some attempts at this it’s usually the same product basic paper from a photocopy folded into a sleeve. Mind you I’m no marketing executive but the “final Judgement,” results in condemnation where your art is thrown into the consumer hell fire which is usually reserved for the refuse that ends up at the dollar store. I’ll have to make some adjustments to apply the process but this article has given my soul and art a new way to live and be expressed, thank you very much as god as my witness I cant begin to tell you how much I love this website, it has such a good spirit behind it one that gave me the ability to breath. thank you once again and god bless you
Katey Says: May 18th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
This guide is amazing! You just answered all of my questions! Thank you so much.
tonyk Says: June 26th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
As most home laser printers won’t take a thick cover card (usually a minimum of 250gm is needed), it’s usually an inkjet printer that is used for the job. Trouble is, unlike laser print, the ink will run if any moisture (even from sweaty hands) gets anywhere near it. Has anyone tried laminating their covers (either cold or hot lamination). There are some pretty inexpensive laminating machines out there, and it could solve the problem.
Tom Harris Says: June 28th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Nice site, good instructions to get you going. Leaves out all the details of rounding & backing (forming a curved spine that used to be required with old glues if the book would stay together) that are not essential now with modern glue (I use woodworker’s PVA).

Certainly there’s no exccuse for not making a book.

One gripe: the details of sewing the signatures could be plainer, I use a different method and I’d like to se if yours is better/easier.
Tom Harris Says: June 28th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Actually I Googled for kettle stitch and found the following eminently clear explanation.

http://michaelshannon.us/makeabook/index2.html
Hamish MacDonald Says: June 28th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Sorry for not drawing a better illustration of the stitching process. Others have described it already better than I could have here, so I’m happy that someone’s added another link to instructions in addition to the ones I provided in the article.

As for card stock, my laser printer is admittedly a big beast of a thing, but it’s pretty good with handling card stock. I wouldn’t use a bubblejet specifically because using water-soluble ink just seems like asking for trouble.

I looked into lamination, but I had several problems with what I saw:
- The big, blank overlapped edge needed around a page to seal it closed.
- The rigidity (folding it nicely would be a challenge).
- The feel: laminated stuff seems ‘officey’ to me.

All this said, it would be nice to be able to produce a cover at home that felt a tad more polished and was more durable. But people seem to like my books as they are already, and are impressed that I made them. There’s a level of polish beyond which I think they might lose their personal, handmade quality.
Marcelo Says: June 29th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
Hi, nice article… cleared a lot of things to me. Just one question: What printer do you use to print the inside pages? (That Phaser 6100 which you mentioned?)
Hamish MacDonald Says: July 2nd, 2006 at 11:36 am
Yes, I use the Xerox for the inside pages. The beauty is that it has duplexing (it prints one side of the page, pulls it back in, then prints the other).

With my previous printer, I had to print one side, flip the pages over, then run them through the printer. This frequently resulted in one page getting jammed and crushed halfway through the job. AARGH!

I think the Xerox is a model from a few years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was something newer, better, and maybe even cheaper available.

I’m about to move house, and I’m really not looking forward to shifting that thing. It’s like having a Lada parked in my bedroom.
Douw in Pretoria RSA Says: July 5th, 2006 at 8:29 am
1. Excellent starter for dummies
2. What is wrong with aiming for perfection?!
3. Is leather covers put of bounds for amateurs like me?
4. Where do I start looking for instructions to restore some of the old, well-worn books I collected through the years and still like to refer to often with fear of them falling apart in my hands.
Excellent site
Thanx a million
Hamish MacDonald Says: July 5th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
1) Thanks so much!

2) Perfectionism, in my experience, usually leads people to either do nothing because they’re afraid of falling short, or to discredit their efforts. Doesn’t mean I don’t still try to do my best, but I find the definition of “my best” often expands as I learn more. So I think it’s always better to just do *something* and learn from that.

3) I try to avoid animal products, so I haven’t worked with leather. I imagine it would be a lot tougher to work with than paper, although ultimately more durable, and perhaps the thickness of it would hide some mistakes.

4) I’ve got a book at home that has a section on restoration, but I’m on vacation at the moment in PEI, so I don’t have access to it and can’t remember the title. I’m sure Googling for the term “book restoration” would bring you lots of information, some of which would be directly available online. This would be a great application for home bookbinding, though.
mamat Says: July 8th, 2006 at 11:00 am
lyx would also be a good choice for a free, opensource software to write a book with. it uses latex which is really good at formating the text for printing.
Mike Byrne Says: July 11th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Definitely the best artice I have found (in years of study) on the business - and the pleasure - of making books by hand. Now I must confess. I am a publisher, based in Wales and specialising in… guess what? Yes! hand-made books!
I started doing this in 2002, and publish mostly poetry collections. I too have had to learn the whole business from the ground up and, happily, I have made a (minor) success of it so far, with over two thousand copies of seven separate books sold so far. Marketing and selling is another world, however, and requires a lot of patience and even more courage.
I, like you, would be happy to share my experiences, knowledge and insights with others: all they have to do is get in touch.
Lastly, if you will be kind enough to let me have a postal address I will consider it a privelidge to send you a copy of my last publication for your pleasure. (I don’t write the books by the way, I just publish them.) Thank you again for a wonderful website: a real pleasure!
Congratulations,

Mike.
K I L T I E Says: July 14th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Wow. I am an amateur author who’s just gotten into bookbinding. I wish I had found this site before putting my first book together. I’d decided to make a few copies of my own by hand for my friends and me before I tried to approach a publisher. I had taken out a book on binding, but there were still a few things I found out the hard way.
Now that I’ve decided I really like binding my own books, I have a few journal projects in mind as well, but I’d really like to be able to find some fancier materials such as papers or covering fabrics. The closest I’ve got is my local craft store. I’ve been looking online, but they still seem difficult to find. My main problem is not being able to find full sheets of specialty papers large enough to cover the whole book without covering the spine separately. I’d also like to try making my own.
I like the way your site is laid out, by the way. Very attractive.
Hamish MacDonald Says: July 18th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Wow! What great comments. I love the idea that other people are out there doing this, too.

To Mike Byrne: I’m very interested in what you’re doing (publishing hand-made books), and would love to talk more. I’d particularly be interested in learning how you made two thousand books without exhausting yourself! And then, of course, I’d love to pick your brain about how you’ve publicised these works. I’ve found it so much easier to promote myself in Canada than in the UK; there seems to be more resistance here to DIY/non-corporate projects… Or something. (And you can find my postal address on HamishMacDonald.com!)

The book I mentioned earlier, which contains many examples of traditional, more formal binding (including the rounded-spine variety that was asked about earlier). It’s called Hand Bookbinding, and it’s by Aldren A. Watson.

But I found this one much more fun and useful: Making Books by Hand, by Peter and Donna Thomas.

To Eric Ellis, who was looking for CD sleeve suggestions: I found an amazing book in a shop down in London that specialises in books full of royalty-free images. The book is called Folding Patterns for Display and Publicity, from The Pepin Press. It’s a huge tome filled with hundreds of packaging suggestions, and includes a CD-ROM with all the patterns as EPS files. There are several different layouts for CD sleeves, nearly all of which can be made from a single sheet.
Jeff Potter Says: July 28th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Hi Hamish! What a great resource. (NMK rocks!) I’ve been DIY publishing and zeening for decades now, but have never made my own books by hand (well, back in the day I copied and stapled my zeens…those were good handcraft days). Oneathesedays I’m gonna make my own books! Take back the craft…show my kids the reality behind the keyboard-clicking. I might even get my own small press, trimmer, binder, etc., and really do it up. I find that working on a computer makes me appreciate handwork that much more. So there’s handmade art editions in my future. Anyway… I see that you dismiss PoD. Now, I’ve never done PoD in the full service sense but I find it to be a necessary and wonderful thing. Maybe we’re not talking apples-apples here, but your options list jumps from DIYing a dozen labor-intensive art editions to offset printing 500+. We need a 20-200 unit option, right? Right! Well, there is one and it’s great. I’ve worked with DOCUTECH printers many times now. I have to say that http://FidlarDoubleday.com is the cheapest I’ve found. I upload any PDF to them and they send me back perfectbound paperbacks with full-color covers a couple weeks later. That’s what I call PoD. They cost about $4 each for 20-200 units of a 6×9 200-page novel. (Far cheaper than CafePress!) This is a commercially viable print-cost! You can wholesale these to retailers at 40% off a $10 cover price and still make a profit (well…). At a $15 cover price you can work with the normal book trade (wholesalers and Amazon want 55% off) and not lose your shirt. (FYI, a standard in the book biz is to have cover price be 6-8X printcost—one reason for offset!) You can fill DocuTech books with B&W photos if you like—they come out great. Basically, you can’t distinguish them from offset—cover or text. To me, DocuTech is a form of PoD that is essential. It leaves all control up to you. Nothing else covers the 20-200 print-run range acceptably. Whattaya think? Cheers, JP
Jeff Potter Says: July 28th, 2006 at 9:41 am
PS: As regards offset, I found http://colorhousegraphics.com to be the cheapest by far. They can print 2000 units of a 6×9 200-page novel from uploaded PDFs for about $2K. That’s the way to do it! –JP
Verlon Gilbreath Says: August 15th, 2006 at 12:10 am
There is a great freeware program that I found at ToolsCenter.org. It is a front-end processor for LaTeX documents. It lets you concentrate more on your document, book, article, etc. and much less on the mechanics involved. There are many templates available that make the output very publish-worthy. It is necessary to learn a bit about LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tek”)but the result is worth it.
Hamish MacDonald Says: August 16th, 2006 at 5:16 am
EEK! No, LaTeX is not for me. I don’t want to have to do any kind of manual markup when I’m in writing mode. But if that’s what you like, great — go for it.

As for Print-on-Demand, I do see the point. I had a book launch this summer in Toronto, and I slaved for about two weeks when I got back to Edinburgh to make enough books to fill the orders from the event. So for higher-volume runs, I get the sense of it.

It’s just not how I wanted to go about it this time, when the whole exercise of publishing my third book was about DIY and not having to process my art through a company. I like being able to produce a book whenever I want without needing to rely on outside resources. It also adds a distinction to my work, which, as an unknown author, is always helpful.
Steve Padgett Says: August 16th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Regarding your comments on Word and justification… what’s happened in the case you described is that Word has introduced a line-break rather than a hard return/paragraph break at the end of the line. If you had WordPerfect instead of Word you could hit Alt-F3 and see it directly, but it’s easy enough to get rid of. Go to the end of the line, hit Delete (bringing the next line up to the end of this one), then hit return. That’ll fix it. If it’s often a problem, even though you can’t see it in Word, you can get rid of it wherever it appears. Hit Ctrl-H to bring up find and replace, type ^l - that’s a small letter L - in the Find What box, and ^p in the Replace With box, and click on Replace All.
I’m not a huge fan of Word, it’s much easier to do these things in WordPerfect: because you can see *all* the formatting in your document; because Word can introduce much more troublesome formatting than this, that’s impossible to get rid of - in Word - open the file in WordPerfect and you can handle it readily enough; because WordPerfect will format your pages for book printing (it’s under Format, Page, Page Setup - the Layout tab); send the proper instructions for 2-sided printing to whatever printer you’ve got; let you reprint 1 page - with the proper imposition - to replace the page that got messed up in doing 2-sided printing with a printer that can’t do it automatically; let you embed your fonts with your document; let you publish to PDF; etc. etc.
I’ve only printed two perfect-bound books so far, and I’ve got a lot to learn, but WordPerfect has made it much easier. I can’t help proselytising; I’m a huge fan.
Steve
jim Says: August 17th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
This is more specific to making journals but looks like a really great stitch-by-stitch tutorial:
http://curiouslycrafty.wordpress.com/tutorials/
Vixen522 Says: August 18th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
This has helped me immensely! Great article, Thanks!
Clay Says: September 4th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Thanks for your article. This type of publishing might be best for me since I will probably find a smallish audience for my books, which are translations.

My main question so far: Isn’t it much more expensive to print books on printers instead of on a press? Is there a printer out there that does the job most economically? I’ve ordered Gigabook’s handbook and hope this matter is covered. But I’ll take all the opinions I can. Your Xerox 6100 seems to be quite the investment.
Steve Padgett Says: September 5th, 2006 at 3:41 am
It’s a matter of scale. There’s a minimum charge for the printer to set your book up at all; you have to figure out for yourself where the break-even point is on the raw cost. No matter how cheaply you value your own labor, printing and binding yourself is not really cheap overall.

Check out the messages up above from Jeff Potter for a couple of alternatives.

There is another consideration though. As Hamish points out just above, sometimes it’s a special one-off, and sometimes you just *want* the experience of doing it yourself.

Steve
Victor Grieve Says: September 5th, 2006 at 11:29 am
As a retired Compositor who set books and magazines by hand with metal type, I find it amazing that it is now possible to set, print and bind a book in colour in ones own home. There were no computers in my working days, the composing room having changed very little in the last 400 hundred years. Your articles are excellent and have given me a new interest in life. Many thanks for giving your time.

Victor
Hamish MacDonald Says: September 8th, 2006 at 5:36 am
On 5 October at The Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh, I’m going to be heading a panel discussion about self-publishing/DIY culture. Following that, I’m giving a demonstration called “Quick ‘n’ Dirty Bookbinding”.

In preparation, I’ve made a wee take-away guide that, hopefully, makes the process simple with some illustrations and instructions.

I’ve made a printable PDF of the guide, which you can download from my website. It just needs to be:
- Printed on both sides of the paper.
- Cut along the middle of the page (side to side, not top to bottom).
- Stapled.

Quick ‘n’ Dirty Bookbinding: A4
Quick ‘n’ Dirty Bookbinding: Letter
Aaron Lethbridge Says: September 17th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Fantastic article. It gives hope and insight to the budding author and renews determination to keep cracking away without corporate reliance.
Susan Helms Says: September 24th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Hamish

Wow! I am just getting ready to begin self-publishing, and this article was the best. Thank you for taking the time to pass on the information, including the links for ClickBook and the ISBN’s. Other than cost, do you have any other issues with QuarkXPress?

Susan Helms
Hamish MacDonald Says: September 25th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Gosh, thanks for all the nice comments.

Susan, it’s funny you should ask me about Quark, because I’ve been using it for years, but I tried its main competitor, Adobe InDesign, for the first time yesterday, and… wow.

People love to hate Quark, mainly for the company’s reputation of having become complacent and surly because of their long-unchallenged monopoly in desktop publishing. I don’t know about that, but I can say that my experience of InDesign is that it’s a much better product. Switching to it was definitely an adjustment, but with every change I thought, “Oh, that’s so smart!” I don’t have that reaction with Quark.
Jennifer Fiander Says: September 25th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Hi Hamish, I’m not sure how I stumbled upon your site, but I’m SO glad I did! I have a question for you, and I’m glad you lived in Canada, so hopefully you know the practices here. I checked out the website link you included for Canadians to get the ISBN. (thank you) Here’s my *dumb* question of the day: Do you need a barcode to sell in a bookstore as well?
From what I remember when I checked a few years ago, getting a barcode was quite costly? I’m concerned about the cost of setting up barcodes because we have so many books. If I’m hoping to sell to bookstores, do I need the ISBN AND the barcodes?
Thanks for the input!
Hamish MacDonald Says: September 26th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Hi Jennifer. Not a dumb question at all. It’s difficult to find all this information, because it’s splattered over several different organisations (government agencies, commercial printers, etc.). That’s why I wanted to bring what I’ve learned together in one place.

The barcode is generated from your ISBN. It’s helpful to people working in bookstores, ’cause then the clerks can just use their flashy-red-light-gunny-thing on the book instead of entering the details manually. It likely helps the store with their inventory control, too.

There’s a link in the article where you can go to get a printable graphic of your ISBN for free. Just search back for “barcode”.

Good luck with your project!
Ron Rinehart Says: October 11th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Thanks for the info. I enjoyed reading it.

I found your site while searching for more information about what kind of glue to use in binding perfect bound books. PUR seems to be in use by large print houses, but I don’t need a 55-gal drum of it or even a 5 gal pail. So, maybe you or others know where to get PUR in, say, 1 pound lots.

My use for this is in binding daily logs (diaries or journals) each year. The least satisfying part of this has been the gluing process. I print covers using glossy photo paper in 13″ by 19″ format on a Canon S9000. Admitedly, the color can smear if it gets wet, but it looks fine for my one-of-a-kind use and easily fits the 5 1/2″ by 8 1/2″ format I use. Printing of the inside also done on the Canon but I have to manually flip each page end over end to get two-sided printing to come out right. And I do use and enjoy Adobe InDesign. I have a textbook (printed commercially, but I am my own publisher and distributor), so InDesign lets me do all the formatting I need and does a great job. For the first three editions, I used MS Word, but InDesign is far superior for such a large project (504 pp all tolled).

Well, I tend to write very long emails but will bridle back for now since this site seems to not include really long responses. Again, thanks for a very nice web site.
Lea Sorensen Says: October 15th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Oh how much I want to thank you for fully explaining how to make a pressed book as I have been trying to do this as I am my own Publisher and Author of my Children’s Books. I didn’t want to use staples as i want to make it a safety issue because of the age group I cover. I had been surching a way and keep coming up with bining with my bining machine but knowingthat a child would easily take it apart 2 minutes or less. Other websites don’t make it clear and I found many confusing cause they don’t explain or missed a step. I am just starting off with my books. Doing it CD, DVD and wanted to do my books as well (I have them already in hard copy for a while, just was missing this part of the link) again oh so much again I thatnk you!! Lea Sorensen
Clay Says: October 21st, 2006 at 11:13 pm
I just bought one of those model p7200 paper folding machines after I realized that it could easily pay for itself and make it possible to produce a lot more books in general. One question, though: When I tested the thing today it got jammed a couple times. It did not come with a whole lot of instructions, so I was wondering if you have any tips about how to make it work more relialby. After all, I expect to it to fold a million sheets for me.

Also, after shopping around and finding a very large price-range for the machine, I was very pleased to find it at OfficeMax.com for about $236 and delivered in less than 3 days.
Hamish MacDonald Says: October 22nd, 2006 at 9:54 am
I can’t remember the model name of my paper folder, but it’s a Martin Yale. I’ve not had any problems with it jamming at all.

The tricky part for me is that I’m folding A4 paper in half. While you can configure the device to make all manner of folds (three-panel pages, letter folds, etc), I’ve adjusted it to fold A4 to an A5 size, and since my guillotine cuts aren’t quite precise, the folds can be a bit wonky at times.

The biggest hurdle, though, is how sensitive the machine is to changes in the weather. Some days (like today, thank God) it shoots pages out into nice, neat stacks. Other days, however, it spews them out all over the place like some mad invention gone wrong.
Hamish MacDonald Says: October 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
Expensive experience in the field:

My colour laser printer is breaking down. It seems to need a new transfer belt or drum — either one of which would cost half the price of a new printer.

Add to this the fact that its text was never as nice as my old cheap laser printer, and its colour output couldn’t match my mum’s home printer.

So I’m taking a step backwards: I’ve ordered a mono (black and white) Kyocera printer that’s supposed to be “environmentally friendly” (ozone-free, the only consumable bit is the toner cartridge, which is rated as lasting longer, etc.). That’s for the pages.

For the covers, I’ve ordered a standard inkjet printer, and will be testing out various papers to find one that will withstand being touched, getting damp, etc. (I’ve found a waterproof paper, so we’ll see how that works as an overleaf.)

The bottom line? A low-end-of-the-high-end machine can be inferior in many ways to high-end-of-the-low-end equipment. If I were doing this again (and I’m more or less having to), I wouldn’t buy a colour laser printer.
Oceanwatcher Says: October 23rd, 2006 at 3:28 pm
I loved this article and was a bit amazed that nobody mentioned Scribus. This is an open source program for making printed stuff. Take a look at

http://www.scribus.net/

You can also find a portable version somewhere that allow you to run it from a USB flash drive.

Not bad to have something like this for free
Hamish MacDonald Says: October 23rd, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Thanks for mentioning that.

I’ve been playing with Scribus for the past few days, and…

It’s hard.

This is my beef with a lot of opensourceware: it works the way programmers think, not the way those of us used to commercial programs think.

I really do want to use it, because it seems powerful and could potentially replace all those dodgy copies of expensive commercial software, which we could all feel better about.

But, for instance, today I tried to import the Word document of my novel into Scribus and all the text styles disappeared. There’s no way I’m going through to find every instance of a character thinking to himself and update the italics.

So I tried opening the file in OpenOffice, saving out in its native file format, then bringing that into Scribus. Now I had text styles, but Scribus complained that every font in the document wasn’t loaded on the system (the same system that produced the document).

So it’s not there yet. But if that was all you knew from the beginning and weren’t mentally hobbled by another ideas of how it’s supposed to work, I bet you could do everything with it. And it’ll only get better.

There’s also a vector illustration program I’ve been told about called Inkscape. (Again, though, its differences from Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks bugged me so much today that I had to stop using it. “How the hell do you grab a single point on a shape?!” Basics like that.)

Programs mentioned:
Scribus (http://www.scribus.net)
OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org)
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org)
jack Says: October 24th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
For short run books, professionally printed and bound, I find http://www.createbooks.com great! You can get 50 perfect bound books… 200 pages, colour cover for $299, (less when the quantity goes up). Get an ISBN, bar code, into Google Book Search, and Books in Print while you’re at it.
Julie Says: October 26th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
Awesome resource. For someone like me, just getting into the whole world of self-publishing, this is a great alternative site to something like lulu.com. I’ve done one book on my own but now that I’ve got some of the great wisdom from this site I’m going to keep trying.

Thanks for all the advice.
Julie
Hamish MacDonald Says: October 27th, 2006 at 6:52 am
That’s great to hear, Julie! It’s gratifying that so many people are catching on to this idea, but it’s even better when they reach the point of actually producing real, live books.

As an addendum to my printer experience, the dedicated mono laser printer I got does, indeed produce far, far crisper text — so much so that I may need to change to a font with a heavier weight.

And the colour cover overleaf sheets I’ve printed on a joe basic DeskJet look amazing. There’s just no comparing the old laser ones to these.

So this is the setup I’d recommend to anyone starting their own press at home. What makes me happy is that it’ll be cheaper to start and to maintain — meaning the whole arrangement is more accessible to more people.
Clay Says: October 29th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Hi Hamish, I’m sorry to go on about the paper
> folder - I had got it working much better after
> making an adjustment, but then I printed my book
> 336 pages, or 86 actual printed pages. After
> running them through the laser printer, they get
> hot and warped which makes them difficult to
> send through the paper folder. Have you had
> such a problem? Maybe its because I’m printing
> such a thick book…Clay
Hamish MacDonald Says: October 30th, 2006 at 8:07 am
Hi, Clay. Yeah, I have had this problem, moreso with other printers I’ve had, the ones that didn’t duplex. By the time I manually put the paper through again, the pages were pretty curly.

Of course, the obvious thing to try is to let the pages cool off and to curl them in the opposite direction. I had some success with this, but the odd jam nonetheless.

Ultimately, I have the odd page on which the text isn’t perfectly straight-looking after I trim the book, but I figure these are hand-made books, and people appreciate that, so I try to resist my perfectionism and think of them as “character”.

But, no, I have no quick fixes for that one. Sorry.
Clay Says: October 30th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Thanks! I guess it’s all part of the fun.
Hugh G. Poopalot Says: November 9th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
A crazy question: Does anyone actually create these handmade books with an ink-jet printer. If so, what are the considerations involved.
Hamish MacDonald Says: November 10th, 2006 at 7:23 am
As I said above, I’m making the overleaf covers for my books on an inkjet printer now, and the results are amazing. I’m sure the ink won’t go far and will be pricey to replace, but the result justifies it.

Printing the inside pages though would be prohibitively expensive. For a poetry chapbook you would be fine, but a novel would kill so much ink that you’d have to charge a ridiculous price to cover the cost of making the book.
george Says: November 12th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Hi.. I trying to create a 40 page 8.5×11 poem book for a client… they will only need about 10 copies at most so going the pro publishing route is just not cost effective. I was tyring out blurb because I like the way their hardcovers print.. but their software is buggy and terrible. I was wondering if anyone had any advice or options.. I was hoping for a nice hardcover with slipcover.. I don’t like the shutterfly/my publsiehr look. thx.
jack Says: November 12th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Createbooks will build hardcover Smythe sewn books in small numbers. These are lovely hand made bindings and worth the wait. createbooks.com
Christina Says: November 20th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
This is exactly the kind of article I’ve been looking for. Thank you so much!
Susan Potocki Says: November 20th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Thanks for putting up such a well thought out site. It’s a great jumping off point for people wanting to get into self publishing. If I’d found it years ago, I wouldn’t have had to learn so much stuff myself the hard way.

There’s something I’ve been trying to figure out for years myself, and I don’t see it here either. Many of the professionally bound books in my collection have a strip of cloth attached down the spine of the signatures. This cloth strip is not attached to the hardcover spine, and allows the signatures to flex as they want when the book is opened, thereby reducing stress on the stitching and improving the durability of the book. This, therefore, seems a worthwhile technique for the home book binder to know.

I have not discovered the method by which books are bound this way. I do not know if the cloth strip is stitched or simply glued into the signatures or how it is attached to the cover boards at the edges. Thus far I have resisted the temptation to disassemble one of my precious books to learn this technique. Do you have any thoughts or ideas on this technique, or know where I might learn more about how to duplicate it in my own books?

I also notice no mention of the free open source Postscript Utilities that other people here might want to know about. These utilities include two programs that I have found invaluable. They are psbook, which handles all the matters of imposition, and psnup, which shrinks and rotates the pages onto the printed sheets of paper.

With them I can take any program that produces postscript output (I use OpenOffice and Word) and, with the right command line options, they will produce an output postscript that can be sent directly to the printer. They are even capable of rotating and flipping the sub pages on the printed sheets so that your second step of cutting your pages in half becomes a simple quadrifold and cut on the guillotine once the pages are bound.

Figuring out the correct command line options for them can be tricky and requires a bit of trial and error, but once that’s solved, they’re a “fire and forget” solution. I’ve got them set up on my computer as a virtual printer. If I want to print out a book, all I need to do is select the “BookBinder” virtual printer instead of the default printer, and my signature pages come out of my printer all ready for folding and stiching.

This is just something I though worth mentioning.
Hamish MacDonald Says: November 21st, 2006 at 8:28 am
Thanks for your insights, Susan.

The gauzey cloth you’re talking about is called mull, and I’ve seen it in art shops where bookbinding tools are sold. Personally, I haven’t felt a need for a third layer of reinforcement (stitching, glue, and mull).

I had a quick flip through Hand Bookbinding by Aldren A. Watson (my ’serious’ bookbinding book, which I don’t often refer to because his methods are laborious and involve various exotic racks and binding supplies). His methods use mull as well as a fourth type of reinforcement, cloth tapes.

In Watson’s description, he says to “Cut a piece of mull 1 inch shorter than the height of the signatures and 2 1/2 inches wider than their bulk combined with the two cover boards.” Then, after gluing it over the signatures (and reinforcing tapes in his example), “trim the mull and tapes back to within 1 inch of the hinges.”
(Hand Bookbinding, A Manual of Instruction by Aldren A Waton, Dover Publications, 1986, pp 82, 83. ISBN 0-486-29157-X)

As for your PostScript tools, I’d never heard of these. They sound useful, if you’re the type of user who isn’t scared off by command-line tools. I like ClickBook’s graphical interface, which lets you choose your page layout and see what the result is going to look like before sending the job to the printer (and using paper, toner, etc).

Also, I wonder how PostScript tools will work with home printers. The situation may have changed, but I remember my old Apple StyleWriter 2400 couldn’t understand the jobs I tried sending from Quark (a layout program that uses PostScript). That said, I’m having no difficulties printing from Quark to my HP DeskJet, so maybe modern printers don’t have an issue with PostScript information.

I tried, yet again, to switch to open-source tools for my books, OpenOffice for my novels and Scribus for a graphical ‘zine I was working on. OpenOffice wouldn’t play nicely with ClickBook and the jobs kept vanishing before reaching the printer. And Scribus seems to lack some layout features I needed. Maybe they’re there, but I’m too goal-orientated to spend lots of time learning a new program.

The same is true with book-binding: I have no doubt there are superior bookbinding methods, but if the result is the same to the end-user, I’m not interested in invisible details. For some people, though, the finessing, the craft itself, is the big reward. So I suppose one’s motivations will ultimately shape their process.
Susan Potocki Says: November 22nd, 2006 at 9:12 pm
So it’s called a “mull”. Thanks for letting me know. The ones in my professionally bound books look more like thick ribbon than gauze, but now that I know its name, further internet searches will probably be a lot easier. Thanks also for the bibliographic information. I’ll look into Watson’s and the Thomas’s books the next time I’m in Portland, Oregon, or, failing that, on Amazon.

When I first started teaching myself the art of book binding several years ago, there simply weren’t the resources on the web like your excellent site (or I couldn’t find them because I didn’t know the terms to search for). I probably should have kept looking. I’m glad to see the art is becoming more common, and there are good sites like yours to help people avoid learning the hard way.

I suspect your problem with ClickBooks and OpenOffice probably came from using the windows edition of OpenOffice. I, myself, only have experience with the unix version of OpenOffice, and ClickBooks is not available for unix. OpenOffice is itself theoretically capable of handling the tasks of layout and imposition, and I fought with it for some time before giving up and just knuckling down and getting the Postscript Utilities to work.

They were not easy to figure out initially (though much easier than OpenOffice), and I wasted quite a few sheets of paper in the process of making my first book with them. Once I figured out all the settings and got my scripts working, though, I haven’t had to touch them since. If I want to print folios, I print my document to the “Bookbinder” virtual printer, and all the layout happens automatically in the background. If I want to print quartos, I use the “Quarto” virtual printer. I haven’t bothered figuring out the command line options for printing octavos because the resulting pages from a letter or A4 sheet are simply too small.

Finally, for home printers that don’t understand the postscript output from the Postscript Utilities, there is another free program called Ghostscript that acts as a postscript interpreter. It can translate postscript into the native printer language of almost all major consumer level printers.

I guess, as in so many things, it’s a trade off between how much you’re willing to learn and work versus how much money you’re willing to spend. Open source software is free and does work, but you pay for it with mental sweat. I never intended to become a unix nerd when I started binding my own books, but, for me, it was a choice between spending money on expensive commercial software or spending it on a good high quality duplexing printer. Granted, I had to learn to use these user-unfriendly programs once a few years ago, but I’m also not constantly fighting paper jams today.
Hamish MacDonald Says: November 22nd, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Thanks for all the extra info, Susan. Two quick corrections:

I believe I’ve led you astray in talking about ‘mull’, which is gauze-like material that goes over the spine, when I think what you were actually asking about is a headband, that decorative strip across the top under the cover. In modern bookbinding, to my understanding, it’s purely decorative. I’ve seen them for sale, little sticky bits with cloth at the top in alternating colours.

And to clarify, I’m just a contributor to this site. It was started — and I believe is still mostly run by — Jim Munro, an author-friend I met when I lived in Toronto. I’m with you, though: he’s done a neat thing in providing this forum for DIY culture.
Susan Potocki Says: November 22nd, 2006 at 9:40 pm
There’s something else I neglected to add above:

Since I only produce at most two or three copies of each book I write, durability is paramount over production complexity. Obviously, self publishers who intend to sell their work put a higher value on speed.

On that note, however, there is one relatively quick modification you might want to add to your Perfect Binding instructions above that I discovered during my own trial and error learning curve. After you’ve stacked the pages, put the stack in the press WITHOUT THE COVER and cut a series of very shallow notches into the spine every quarter inch or so with a thin saw blade (I find a miniature metal cutting saw with the teeth pointed backwards works best). Then put the cover into the press as normal, making sure to keep the pages stacked, and glue everything up as before. The notches and roughened paper greatly improves the long term holding strength of the glue. A very light scuff sanding on the inside spine of the cover also helps, depending on the glue you use, but not as much as notching.

Once you get the technique down, this extra step adds less than a minute to the production time of each book. I have never had a page come out of a book I bound this way, even with a lot of wear and tugging.

Finally, there is a combination glue bottle and roller that wood joiners use which makes glueing up fast, easy, and very tidy. They come in various widths and don’t cost more than a few dollars each (without glue). I’ve never seen any in the craft stores I frequent, but they are readily available from most cabinet maker, veneer, or woodworking supply shops. Once you get the hang of them, you will never go back to using a brush.
Susan Potocki Says: November 22nd, 2006 at 9:49 pm
As to mulls: I’ve done a bit of online research now that I know what they’re called. Apparently, in the past mulls were somehow serged and stitched over at the top and bottom of the spine. The headbands of today are a decorative attempt at duplicating the appearance of this technique, but do not provide the same strength.

I have a lot more research ahead of me to find the original technique, and I will no doubt need to learn yet another stitching method. You’ve definitely given me the start I need to know how and what to look for.
Rick Holbert Says: December 2nd, 2006 at 1:24 am
Hamish, Good article on Micro Publishing…

Like Susan, I also use free software and Linux for my Micro Publishing needs. Some other useful software tools are LyX, mpage, pdfTeX (texexec).

I like to compose my books using LyX on A5 size pages.

Then I can output my books to either postscipt or pdf and use the psutils or mpage to impose the postscript files and pdfTeX (texexec) to impose the pdf files onto letter or A4 size paper.

Also, once the files are converted to pdf, I can use acrobat or other pdf viewer to print them anywhere.

Once printed, I either fold or cut the pages and use Chet’s gigibook method to glue them together and cover them.

I should probably write a new article about Micro Publishing with the new tricks I’ve learned since my old article in the Linux Gazette.
Victor Grieve Says: December 2nd, 2006 at 6:31 am
Is it possible to print A5 pages side by side in Word without a program?
Rick Holbert Says: December 2nd, 2006 at 11:24 am
I don’t know about doing this in Word, but most of the postscript command line tools discussed earlier are available on freeshell.org

You can get a Unix shell account there for $1 US.
eduardo gomez Says: December 15th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
congratulations for the article. My english is awful. Im from argentina. I want to stamp gold letters on the cover. how to do this. thank you very much and merry christmas.
April Says: December 15th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
How do you get the pages in the right order? I’m trying to print a book 4.25×7 in with 2 pages/side and 4 pages per sheet. No matter what I do to stop it, I keep ending up with the pages out of order somehow. One is nearly always NEXT to two rather than on the back and so on.

If you could help me straighten it out, I’d be eternaly grateful.
jack Says: December 15th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Here’s a nice manual technique for mapping page locations learned from an old-timer. It’s pretty foolproof (which is why I like it!?)
Mock up the pages with scrap paper, folded to the right number of pages, 4up in this case.
Once you have a facsimile of the pages laid out in ‘book’ form, (reader’s spreads), number the pages in order, (I like to use unmistakeable BIG numbers on each page).
Unfold and voilà, you have printer’s spreads in signatures.
Enjoy
Steve Says: December 15th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
April:
Actually this is answered up above; do a search (Ctrl-F) for imposition, which is the proper name for it. A possible shortcut for you: some printers have the capability built in - look to see if yours has the option “Print as booklet”. Also, WordPerfect has the option built in to the program as well.
Steve
Hamish MacDonald Says: December 18th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Yeah, the imposition question was covered above, both in my original post and in subsequent comments that mentioned some free/open-source PostScript alternatives to the ClickBook program I use.

As for the gold lettering, I’m afraid I don’t have any experience with that. I’m (mostly) vegetarian, so I don’t use leather when making my books, and leather is what’s usually used when doing embossed lettering and decoration like that. I believe it’s usually done with metal letters hammered into the leather to make an impression, then filled in with some sort of adhesive and gold leaf.

Maybe do a search for “bookbinding, gold-leaf, embossing” (though I suppose “embossed” lettering is raised, not indented, so this may not be the correct term).

Anyone else know more about this?
Rick Holbert Says: December 18th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Some material for practicing your book binding skills…

Here’s a modest repository of Project Gutenberg texts, converted to PDF and LaTeX:

http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark/MarkedTexts.html

LyX and LaTeX source can be found here:

ftp://ftp.sandroid.org/GutenMark/MarkedTexts

These books are formatted for half US letter size paper and should scale nicely to A5, or 2up on A4.
Bullion Grey Says: January 1st, 2007 at 2:14 am
good info…I have self published 6 booklets so far in the past 16 years. I learned a few things here….Not sure what I will do next but I have hand made hundreds of my booklets and sold all I made. I had the first experience with a professional printer and do not recommend it. Do it yourself. I thought of POD Publishing actually back in 1994 and developed a creative soluton that I have used since. Anyone wana chat about self publishing or writing?
Make a follow up comment (of course) and Ill write back.
Cheers!
Hamish MacDonald Says: January 3rd, 2007 at 11:21 am
BG, thanks for your comments. I’m definitely interested in hearing from other people who are doing this crazy self-publishing thing, too. Solidarity and community — you can’t get too much of these when swimming against the tide.

I had a friend ask me — and this is someone I’ve worked on ‘zines with in the past, who’s pretty familiar with this stuff now — what someone has to do to have a *real* press.

“It’s a made-up distinction,” I told her. “Your press is real as soon as you declare it such. The only difference is maybe the amount of money and attention you have, but there’s no difference.”

We want our efforts to be acknowledged as equal and valid, yet sometimes it’s easy to buy into to commercial bumpf — the industry contests and other livestock shows — and to forget that “real” is made up and begins with us declaring ourselves as the real thing. And being in conversation with others who are doing the same thing helps. Jim, whose site this is, was my introduction to that. I still marvel at his ability to make ‘the establishment’ hungry for his fringe thing.’

(I’m writing from a hotspot at Halifax airport, where I’ve got time to kill. Sorry for babbling.)

So, in short, if you want to know more, talk more, or share your experiences with me (because I’ve still got lots to learn, especially about how to reach an audience for a finished book), feel free to contact me at:
postbox AT hamish macdonald DOT com.
Aria Says: January 5th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
thanks, your website is great!! I was wondering if you could post more about duplexing and arranging the pages in a signature. Thanks!!!
rayden54 Says: January 5th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Can you explain how to set up the book prior to printing. I need to know everything you do after typing the text, please.

Also, I’ve printed a cover with a color laser printer before and had problems with the ink chipping off.
Hamish MacDonald Says: January 6th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Re: printing/duplexing

Well, as I said in the article, I use a program called ClickBook to do this. You lay the page out in a word processing program, then print to this program, which sits between the word processor and the printer’s software; it rearranges the pages and resizes them according to the format you choose. Then you fold them in half (or smaller) and bind them together, either by sewing the pages together in groups, or by folding each page individually and gluing the folded edge into a cover.

Over the course of this year, I’m going to create more detailed manuals about my writing and publishing processes. I see there being three workbooks (which I’ll distribute as printable PDFs and bound copies), outlining the three steps in the process:

1) The Idea to Novel Process, outlining how to get from an idea of a book to having a finished manuscript (including character, theme, story arc worksheets, etc).

2) The Novel to Book Process, which explains how to turn that manuscript into a book in your hand by printing and perfect-binding the book at home.

3) The Book to Reader Process. This is the part I know the least about; I’d be very happy to collaborate with someone to create this.

P.S. Again, I’m Hamish MacDonald, the author/self-publisher who wrote this article. Credit for the website belongs to Jim Munro, who is its owner/creator/editor.
Hamish MacDonald Says: January 6th, 2007 at 9:39 am
As for your laser printer toner flaking off, I had this, too, when I was using a laser printer for my covers. Regular card stock, it turned out, wasn’t porous enough, or the finish was too rough — or something — and spray fixative, I found, discoloured the paper and eroded the ink.

What worked for me was buying photo inkjet paper and printing on the wrong (non-glossy) side. Ultimately, though, I switched to printing with an inkjet printer onto the proper side of photo paper, and I’m very happy with the result.
Hamish MacDonald Says: January 6th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Sorry, one more note: I tried ClickBook with OpenOffice.org, and it didn’t work. Other comments here offer an alternative that should work if you’re going the freeware/Open Source route(search the page for “Post Script”).
rayden54 Says: January 6th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Right, Clickbooks. How is the book laid out before you print to it?
Hamish MacDonald Says: January 7th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I just lay the pages out normally in Word, then print them to ClickBook. Here are a few ‘gotchas’ to think about:

- Set up styles for different page elements (chapter heading, chapter subhead, body text); then you can change the text throughout the book without having to manually select and change each element.

- Use single-spaced lines and indent new paragraphs. The stype I’ve learnt is that you *don’t* indent the first paragraph of a new chapter or new section. (By “new section”, I mean a scene that’s set off by a double carriage return, like something that happens later that day — still related enough to be in the same chapter, but needing to look separate. You might even put a bu