theBarnstorming

« The Empress | Main | The Art Fit »

November 01, 2006

Idiots'Books Begins

One of the things I enjoy most is collaborating with Robbi on making books. I do the writing, she draws the pictures, and somewhere in the middle we come up with the conceptual framework for how the two aspects interact. To date, we've produced two major books and one small one in addition to a handful of mini-books for gifts to family and friends. But we haven't yet spent the energy we could or should to get our works published. And who knows if the interest would even be there.

For some time we have talked about taking matters into our own hands and starting our own book publishing project. Now that we have the time to do it properly, we have launched Idiots'Books, a project in which we will produce one collaborative book every month or so. Ten books a year is the plan. Rather than molder on our personal bookshelf as past books have done, the Idiots'Books will be sent to any of our family and friends who are interested in the project. We sent out a mass mailing of 207 books last Thursday. Anyone who wants to sign up may do so for $50 a year, an amount that we hope will cover the cost of printing, binding, and mailing. To date, we've heard back from about 25 people who intend to subscribe. Which delights us to no end.

Anyone reading this who was not on our mailing list may visit the Idiots'Books Web site to learn more about the project and request a free copy of our first title, Facial Features of French Explorers.

More on FFoFE: The idea has been bouncing around in the back of our brains for some time. I don't remember the exact origin of the phrase "Facial Features of French Explorers", but it emerged from a conversation Robbi and I were having at some point. We were delighted at the way it sounded, and resolved that some day it would be the title of a book.

It seemed fitting to kick off the Idiots'Book project with FFoFE. The ball was in my court to begin. I engaged in intensive, backbreaking research of French explorers and their deeds. I engaged in grueling, soul-numbing research on facial charactersitics. Once I had a list of explorers and another of facial characteristics, I made arbitrary pairings, crafted some largely unilluminating paragraphs, and sent the copy to Robbi. She drew some nice pictures, painted them, and set the whole thing in Adobe InDesign. We tweaked and adjusted. We developed a graphic identity for Idiots'Books and created accompanying letterhead and mailing labels. We drafted some hopefully amusing front and back content for the book. We designed a cover. And were ready to produce the sucker.

By now you must be desperate for photos. I don't blame you. The part where we think about and write the book is not very interesting. I could have taken some photos of Robbi drawing, but I didn't. And so you will have to be content with photos of book production. Not the sexiest part of the process, perhaps, but important nonetheless.

Once the document's content is finalized, Robbi has to set it up to print for binding. This means that the pages must be arranged with the end result in mind. Since the pages that make up the book will be stacked and stapled in the middle, the only page that prints opposite its actual partner content is the one that makes up the book's middle spread. All other pages print opposite a page that will appear elsewhere in the book. The pages that make up a spread are joined only when the book is assembled. It's complex and if I'm not being clear, I apologize.

So Robbi wrangles with this complelxity, pushes print, and we wait a long time for the printer to spit out our pages. The complexity strains the printer's brain, as does the file size of the illustrations. We wait and wait and eventually there is a pile of pages ready to be bound.

This is where the photos come in.

First, I gather the seven pages that make up one copy of FFoFE from the tall stack of pages.

Then I jog the pages into a neat stack so that they all line up nicely when bound.

Next, the stack is folded carefully to make a 8.5" x 5.5" dimension booklet from the stack of 8.5" x 11" sheets. Whenever a stack of paper is thus folded, there is the problem of "push out," in which the sheets in the middle of the resulting booklet extend further than the sheets wrapped around it. This is due to the greater "spine" created as each additional sheet is wrapped around the ones closer to the center of the booklet. The outermost front and back page in a book made of seven sheets of paper extends a good eighth of an inch less than the middle sheet. This may seem like a small difference, but it's definitely noticable. Fancy book producing operations would finish the book by making a clean trim across the edge of the pages, thus evening them all out. We are not a fancy book producing operation. But as I folded, I made sure that the unevenness was consistent from front to back, that the end product might have as good a chance as possible of seeming deliberate.

After making the initial fold, I use an ingenious device called a bone folder to make a strong crease across the folded edge that would become the book's spine. The bone folder is, as it sounds, made of bone. It is polished smooth and is of such a texture and consistency as to make a nice crease without harming the paper stock. I do not know what sort of beast has given his bone to the Idiots'Book venture. Perhaps it is best that I don't.

Once the book has been folded, I move on to the trimming. Although we are too primitive to bother with trimming the edges of the pages, the design of FFoFE calls for us to trim 2 inches from the vertical axis to yield a finished size of 5.5" x 6.5". Robbi is a real snob about page size. She hates the 8.5" x 11.5" inch dimension or any obvious derivatives thereof. And so we're always doing spates of reckless trimming to keep her happy.

We are lucky to own the machine pictured above. It is a paper trimmer. The concept is not complex, yet the amount of time this sucker saves in putting together a book requiring trimming is breathtaking. Basically, a small cutting wheel moves along a track. There is an arm that clamps down to hold the stack of pages in place. The cutting wheel moves along its track, neatly trimming the page to the desired size. Easy as pie. The alternative is using a ruler and a razor blade. If we had used this latter route, I would no longer have fingers, and your copy of FFoFE would contain a good deal of my DNA.

The final step after trimming is binding. In the case of FFoFE, which is a relatively short book, we opted for a saddle stitch binding technique. This means binding the pages together across spreads by some means of fixing pages together along their central fold. Many thicker books are perfect bound, which means that individual pages are cut and stacked together and then bound to the spine with glue. (The "pushout" problem would be insurmountable if lengthy books were saddle stitch bound.) But FFoFE, consisting of only seven sheets and a cover, was a good candidate for binding with a stapler. Two staples did the trick. We have a a stapler with a really long "throat," which means that the top and bottom of the stapler attach much further away from one another than they would on a traditional stapler. The resulting "throat" acommodates the entire page of a book that is lying flat to acommodate a staple along its spine.

The bigass stapler (we refer to it as "the longie"):

In action:

After the stapling, there is an important step known as admiring, where one holds the finished product in one's hand and reflects upon the binding process with a bittersweet sentimentaility.

After admiring, there is stacking. Likely I don't need to explain the stacking.

Post-stacking is boxing.

And so on, and so on. Making 200+ books takes some doing, I have found. As much as we hope that some people will choose to subscribe to Idiots'Books, each additional subscriber represents another book that must be produced. And the production method behind FFoFE is about as basic as it gets. We are imagining some rather grand setups for future volumes.

Hopefully this expose of the sausage making that goes into book production hasn't taken too much of the magic out of your finished copy of FFoFE. Like a cook at the end of preparing a big meal, I had zero appetite for FFoFE after hours and days of production. I had lost any faith that what we had produced had the least modicum of value, interest, humor, charm, etc. It has been nice to hear a few positive comments trickle in from the ether.

There is much more to say about FFoFE, but you're probably stiff with boredom. Apologies.

Posted by bogenamp at November 1, 2006 11:21 AM

Comments

Posted by: snikes at November 1, 2006 02:46 PM