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Novel pursuits

8 Sep 2011

A book with words!

This one took us a while, a lot of head scratching and eye-straining.  A friend of ours wanted us to print a very special edition of his first, as-yet unpublished novel;  just something to hold in his hands and be able to read from a planar surface that doesn’t emit light.  Something that you can flip the pages of…  So we were honoured to print a single-copy edition of his first completed novel and perhaps set the ball rolling on his future publications.

A perfect bound soft-cover was the plan and we came out with what I like to label a faux hardcover, because of the rigid nature of the board we used to shield the pages.  We had to head out to a local shop to print the text as we’re not fully situated with the necessary equipment, but what can ya do?  Luckily, they had recycled A4 paper, which lends a very nice “paperback” quality to the paper.

Fold, Trim, Clamp, Glue.

We found some really nice grey construction paper in the scrap bin at a nearby print house which we found useful for the cover and on the morning of the edition’s completion, Zahara had the absolutely brilliant idea to screenprint the titles, so we spent an hour or so working out a design template on a piece of paper and fixed it to the frame directly, which seemed reasonable for a single print and it stood the test of our bravery.  Below you can see how it turned out; we were simultaneously blown away and relieved that our ballsiness paid off.

Clayton still has to perfect the gluing process:  the end papers suffered a bit of stickage to the cover as a result of some leak, which was more or less remedied but still lends a less than desirable wrinkle to the pages.  As it turns out, he also reversed one of the pages such that the spine was out and the page ends were glued into the spine.  Yikes!  Oh well, it will surely be one of these highly sought after first editions in only ten years time.

The dimensions of this copy are approximately 120 x 180 mm.

One lesson learned in this process is that despite the most strained and valiant efforts of perfectionism, errors still occur; that’s forgiveable but on word of honour it pays to remedy them before too long.

I la portada serigrafiada!

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