Small run (< 50) boutique printing

Hey all, I'm working on my first book and would like to ask some questions that I haven't seen answered here (apologies if they have been answered and I just couldn't find them; links would be appreciated). I've got someone to bind for me and help me edit, but I'm still a bit confused about a few issues. I have no experience selling my photography, and just doing this for the experience. I have no hopes or dreams of profiting with this book. I'm still on the fence about whether to put it up for sale or not, I'd just like a few copies to have for myself and maybe friends/family. If I decide to try and sell, I don't even know where to start, maybe some local galleries or coffee shops.

Could I get your advice about this venture? Here's some pertinent information:

- ~70 sheets of paper, 1 image per sheet, 70 images, about 50/50 analog/digital
- Each sheet no bigger than 10"
- All black and white
- Not settled on page size, but since it's a mixture landscape and horizontal, I was thinking maybe square pages, or else landscape
- Very very small run, I was thinking 5 for personal use, but definitely under 50.
- Binding will be taken care of by a friend (although maybe not for 50 books...).

Specific questions:
- How should I print the images? Right now I've been darkroom printing the negatives but since there will be digital images as well, should I find a printer to do it for me for consistency of images?
- Is Kinko's/Staples a decent printer for these types of projects? For drafting/prototyping?
- If sending to a printer, should I digitize my negatives and send them a PDF with the desired layout already done?
- What paper/printing process is good for black and white images? I have a few photo books from blurb and I'd prefer nicer paper, maybe like magazine paper, than the pulp that they sell, if the cost is reasonable. In fact, what is the name of the process they use to print?
- If I do decide to sell, how should price be set with respect to the printing/binding cost? ie. 10% profit? I assume whoever is selling it will want a cut so 10% will be be on top of that.
- Is it generally better to stick with one aspect ratio and use it consistently in the book?

Some philosophical questions:
- Should all images have the same aspect ratio?
- How much text should be in the book?
- Edge-to-edge or bordered images?

Hmm, I guess that's all I can think of for now, but I'm sure I will have more questions as I get further along in the process.

Blimey, that's a lot of questions, about 15 I reckon. That could get a multitude of answers. Sorry haven't got time to answer in detail, but a couple of ideas.

Do you have any prior experience in producing books? If not, would really recommend going on a bookbinding course. Even if you don't plan to produce the books yourself, it will still give you an idea of how a book is physically put together and spark ideas about different bindings. For example, I did this evening class in London for a year which was great.
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The other, (if you haven't already), is to study InDesign with the emphasis on layout. There again, I still do most of my layout on Photoshop if not too much text and is mostly images. However, InDesign is pretty essential for exact layout, ease of editing and producing press ready pdfs.

Then talk to lots of printers to see what they can do. I've had some work printed by print shops as large double sided sheets which I've cut, folded, bound and trimmed, but have still to find a printer who will not just bash things off.

Would expect any retailer to want more than 10%.

I produce some books by hand now and others with Blurb though is always a bit disappointing for BW as no matter how accurate the files are, there is usually a cast.

Mike Crawford said:

I produce some books by hand now and others with Blurb though is always a bit disappointing for BW as no matter how accurate the files are, there is usually a cast.

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A cast with Blurb I should have said. I get very accurate BW if printing digitally myself, but can't talk about that here!

First pertinent question is where are you located? - this will have a big influence on the correct response.

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de

hi banandrew

with regards to aspect ratio
it is a personal preference .. i've made books ( all by hand )
where every image is situated exactly in the same place
on every page, same shape same everything, i have also
made books where they are not all the same, it is all about what you like
and what looks best in the book.

while indesign might be essential and fun, what i might suggest is a bit old-school
i am guessing you have the ability to make a small digital print of every image you
want to use ( digital files on a 11x17 page make 50¢ worth of copies at a copy shop )
and make a small scaled-down mock-up book ... of 4" or 2' photographs ( or the same size, zeroxes are cheap )
and have the photos printed on long sheets of cheap copy paper. cut them out and
and take more paper and fold it and elmer's or mucilage pva or paste your photos in and see what you like best ..
it is a bit more hands-on than doing everything in a computer and you really get a better idea of how books are made.
there are online websites, youtube videos &c on book making, as well as books ( the keith smith series is fantastic as is
books boxes and portfolios ) it really isn't as hard as you might have imagined.

another thing to think about is if you are printing an image on the front and back or are you just doing 1 image 1 page
i ask because each packet of pages ( signature ) is a large sheet folded in half with other pages folded inside of it
so the first page has images from the 1st page and the 14th the 2nd has 2+13 &c so it isn't as straight forward as you might think.
it isn't that much more involved, and doing the hands on mock-up/layout makes it easy to visualize and actually do.

good luck and have fun with your project !
john

Mike Crawford said:

Blimey, that's a lot of questions, about 15 I reckon. That could get a multitude of answers. Sorry haven't got time to answer in detail, but a couple of ideas.

Do you have any prior experience in producing books? If not, would really recommend going on a bookbinding course. Even if you don't plan to produce the books yourself, it will still give you an idea of how a book is physically put together and spark ideas about different bindings. For example, I did this evening class in London for a year which was great.
Dead Link Removed

The other, (if you haven't already), is to study InDesign with the emphasis on layout. There again, I still do most of my layout on Photoshop if not too much text and is mostly images. However, InDesign is pretty essential for exact layout, ease of editing and producing press ready pdfs.

Then talk to lots of printers to see what they can do. I've had some work printed by print shops as large double sided sheets which I've cut, folded, bound and trimmed, but have still to find a printer who will not just bash things off.

Would expect any retailer to want more than 10%.

I produce some books by hand now and others with Blurb though is always a bit disappointing for BW as no matter how accurate the files are, there is usually a cast.

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+1;go with inDesignand find a digital printer for the pdfs

Oh my goodness, that is a lot of responses, thanks everyone for taking the time. Yes I guess there are a lot of questions in the op

I'm in Vancouver canada.

Planning to have one image per sheet of paper.

My friend does book binding (she's an arts student) and she's gone over (some of) the myriad of ways that a book can be bound and covered. We decided to make a mockup full size from the chosen printer (myself or outsourced) and then decide what type of binding is appropriate for the book.

Thanks for the opinions about aspect ratio, I guess I'll do a hodge podge then.

Sounds like going the in design route and sending to a printer like kinkos is what I'm hearing. For digitising images, would scanning negative and doing digital darkroom be preferred over darkroom print and then scanning silver gelatin?

I have some books from blurb and don't really like how the prints look, so I'd prefer not to go that route. Plus I assume they bind and I think my friend wanted to do the binding for me.

About retailing, the 10% was referring to my take after the retailers cut. Assuming retailer wants around 40% that would put retail price roughly double the cost of production.

And I'm definitely having tons of fun already just planning things out! Going to make sure this projects sees itself through one way or another.

banandrew said:

For digitising images, would scanning negative and doing digital darkroom be preferred over darkroom print and then scanning silver gelatin?

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I think I remember @ralphlambrecht has a section in his book doing some comparisons between scanning negs and silver gelatin prints , I'll have a look in there again

It all comes down to what kind of book you want. I was a production manager at Kinko's during my college years, before I moved on to a publishing company specializing in textbooks and scientific publications.

Kinko's, Staples, or any other copy shop is going to be your least expensive and lowest quality level. Even their highest quality will not match what a genuine printer can produce for you. You can produce some very creative work through these outlets. It just won't be glossy offset printing.

A genuine printer will be much more expensive, but the sky is the limit when it comes to the quality options they can offer. Not all printers specialize in the same things. Shop your project around.

Whether you choose Kinko's or the offset printers, they will tell you what format they want your documents in. When I worked in publishing, it was Quark-XPress with images in TIFF format.

I've been thinking about a similar project like you're describing, also with just a few, maximum maybe 30 books. I have no firm plans yet but I'm currently thinking of making and printing the whole thing myself: make prints on FB paper and mount them in passe-partout pages that I can put together in a leporello.
Doing it this way has several advantages:
. you can make as many copies as you want / need,
. no upfront investment needed,
. you control everything yourself, no dependancy on anyone,
. every copy is a hand-made original.
As said, no firm plans yet, this is just my current thinking.

If you got someone doing the book binding then why not make silver gelatin prints and bind them into book.

Very good suggestion, Rob! It would save a lot of work and it might look "cleaner".

The idea of doing book binding is something which interests me and I have done a tad of research into it and into doing some courses here in the UK.

Book binding is a very highly skilled skilled craft. If you want more than a craft hobbyist look to a book then it takes a lot of skill and experience to produce a professional looking bound book.

If you are printing onto silver gelatin paper then you would really need to mount prints to paper. Silver gelatin, especially FB silver gelatin paper doesn't like being bent. If you want the book to be able open flat without bending pages then you need a book specially bound to be able to do that and that requires a good deal of skill to do it well.

RobC said:

The idea of doing book binding is something which interests me and I have done a tad of research into it and into doing some courses here in the UK.

Book binding is a very highly skilled skilled craft. If you want more than a craft hobbyist look to a book then it takes a lot of skill and experience to produce a professional looking bound book.

If you are printing onto silver gelatin paper then you would really need to mount prints to paper. Silver gelatin, especially FB silver gelatin paper doesn't like being bent. If you want the book to be able open flat without bending pages then you need a book specially bound to be able to do that and that requires a good deal of skill to do it well.

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photo paper needs each sheet of paper to be folded over as its own signature and sewn, rather than pages nested to make signatures.
otherwise the pages will "fan" so the spine is tight and the other end of the book does not lay flat. ...
if the photographer can get his / her hands on single weight paper, pages can be split and folded and a trandtional signature can be sewn ..
but as i mentioned earlier it can get tricky unless the pages are mapped out.

good luck OP with whatever you end up doing

I've spent the last couple of years figuring out how I'd like to print my book.
49 images, 8"x10" contact print size. At first I was going to use fiber based silver prints, that made the book very thick, even before mounting them on paper. I tried single weight but couldn't find a multigrade so decided to go the other route.
I've settled on Hahnemuehle Duo so I can print on both sides, cut down to 13" square (each sheet being 13"x26" folded), hand sewn and bound in bookboard covered in black bookcloth with the title debossed. Because it's expensive to produce I've put a silver contact print on the inside back cover, that way I can charge enough to break even. After all that work it's a labour of love and I'll not make a penny from it, that's just fine with me.

@RobC ya actually that was my original thought, to do silver gelatin pages, but there are a number of obstacles I'd have to overcome: first I couldn't figure out whether I'd be able to get a consistent enough look if the images were half digital and half silver gelatin. Next the cost would start to get high, for 35 darkroom prints, that's costing me roughly $35 CAD in paper and chems per book, not to mention the inkjet print costs. The binder I'm working with said that signatures is an option, not required. She knows a technique for binding without signatures, though it might look more "crafty" (not that it's necessarily a bad thing).

Because of these things, plus some of the suggestions in this thread, I'm thinking inDesign might be the way to go, though I might digitize silver gelatin prints rather than negatives. I still really want a book with silver gel prints, though that might just be a one or two-off to keep personally.

As far as digital printers go, if I go that route, I'll send off a copy to Kinko's for a mockup as they're probably the most affordable. Then I'll see firsthand how the images come out and whether they're acceptable to me.

banandrew said:

I think I remember @ralphlambrecht has a section in his book doing some comparisons between scanning negs and silver gelatin prints , I'll have a look in there again

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I would say scanning original prints would be preferable and more consistent than scanning negs though sometimes not as easy if prints are bigger then 10x8. One possible solution is to use a flat copy set up with high end digital equipment. I make my living as a photographic printer, both darkroom and digital, but also get involved in supplying files and scans for clients photobooks. Usually from images and prints I've produced though sometimes just for reproduction.

One book a couple of years ago was for a retrospective of a photographers work from the last 40 years. All the 100 exhibition prints I made were silver gelatin including the digital images via LVT negs. However, when it came to the catalogue, there wasn't enough budget to scan the 60 or so prints which were from negatives, ie did not have a digital file. Instead, I worked with a friend in his studio, with copy lighting and Phase One digital back to make digital copies of these prints and then a few tweaks in Photoshop to make them all consistent. Book was printed in a good duotone so all looked very unified. Hasn't got to be Phase One, but if you or a friend has the right set up, is a lot quicker and easier than scanning. Will not be as fine, but for book reproduction should be good. Using a darkroom print easel underneath the camera is useful for keeping the prints flat, providing the border is big enough and speeds things up.

Mike Crawford said:

I would say scanning original prints would be preferable and more consistent than scanning negs though sometimes not as easy if prints are bigger then 10x8. One possible solution is to use a flat copy set up with high end digital equipment. I make my living as a photographic printer, both darkroom and digital, but also get involved in supplying files and scans for clients photobooks. Usually from images and prints I've produced though sometimes just for reproduction.

One book a couple of years ago was for a retrospective of a photographers work from the last 40 years. All the 100 exhibition prints I made were silver gelatin including the digital images via LVT negs. However, when it came to the catalogue, there wasn't enough budget to scan the 60 or so prints which were from negatives, ie did not have a digital file. Instead, I worked with a friend in his studio, with copy lighting and Phase One digital back to make digital copies of these prints and then a few tweaks in Photoshop to make them all consistent. Book was printed in a good duotone so all looked very unified. Hasn't got to be Phase One, but if you or a friend has the right set up, is a lot quicker and easier than scanning. Will not be as fine, but for book reproduction should be good. Using a darkroom print easel underneath the camera is useful for keeping the prints flat, providing the border is big enough and speeds things up.

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Hi Mike, that's great advice thank you very much. The prints I'm making were working prints I originally thought would be the pages in the book, so they are 8x10's which I could flatbed scan. Your mention of LVT negs sounds interesting. Did you feel that this helped to get a consistent look more than the duotone printing? Or did they contribute equally? I may look for someone in the Vancouver area to do that for my digital images.

banandrew said:

Hi Mike, that's great advice thank you very much. The prints I'm making were working prints I originally thought would be the pages in the book, so they are 8x10's which I could flatbed scan. Your mention of LVT negs sounds interesting. Did you feel that this helped to get a consistent look more than the duotone printing? Or did they contribute equally? I may look for someone in the Vancouver area to do that for my digital images.

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Hello. The LVT negs were purely for printing the exhibition prints so the show looked unified. Helped that 96% were either 35mm or 2:3 digital proportion. For book repro, used the files I had worked on to get the LVT negs made and the files made by photographing the darkroom prints from the 35mm negs. Before supplying to the designer, I went through them all to make sure they flowed together though aesthetically there will always be a difference between a 35mm shot from the 70s to a digital shot converted to BW. But it seemed to work.

On a separate note, I think it was Jnanian earlier mentioned about making small dummies to get the feel of the edit. I find this essential if producing my own small volumes. Especially if they are compiled of several sections bound together. As long as all the pages are numbered, when you take it apart, you know which images are printed on the same sheet back and front.

Mike Crawford said:

Hello. The LVT negs were purely for printing the exhibition prints so the show looked unified. Helped that 96% were either 35mm or 2:3 digital proportion. For book repro, used the files I had worked on to get the LVT negs made and the files made by photographing the darkroom prints from the 35mm negs. Before supplying to the designer, I went through them all to make sure they flowed together though aesthetically there will always be a difference between a 35mm shot from the 70s to a digital shot converted to BW. But it seemed to work.

On a separate note, I think it was Jnanian earlier mentioned about making small dummies to get the feel of the edit. I find this essential if producing my own small volumes. Especially if they are compiled of several sections bound together. As long as all the pages are numbered, when you take it apart, you know which images are printed on the same sheet back and front.

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I'll follow that advice and get a dummy together first before trying anything else. What do you look for in the dummy and why do you find it essential? For the ordering/sequencing? And how to section the book?

banandrew said:

I'll follow that advice and get a dummy together first before trying anything else. What do you look for in the dummy and why do you find it essential? For the ordering/sequencing? And how to section the book?

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Actually, maybe Dummy is the wrong word as I always think of a dummy as being a finished volume, ready to show people. Obviously a dummy is not a book with the quality of a finished work, though a Blurb could be seen this way, but is a properly edited, sequenced, often printed to the same size as the hopefully published book.

What I was think of is maybe the dummy before the dummy. I always start with small prints of everything I'm thinking could be in the book. Will digitally print out a load of these, (2x3 or 3x3") so I can just work with on a big table to make a sequence. See which go together, which do not, which work as single spreads, others double page spreads and of course, which really do not work at all so are out the edit. Of course, this could be done on screen but I always think it is easier and more intuitive to do it physically. Then when I think I like it, will collate a load of folded A4 sheets of paper to make a blank book. In doing this, have to think if it is all done in one section, ie all the folded sheets together to be bound, or if it will be different sections together, which will then be bound. I will have an idea how many pages it should be by my editing of the small prints. Also taking into consideration title pages, credits, paper to attach the covers etc.

Important to then number each page including endpapers. Then stick in the small prints on the right page, ideally with removable tape. When finished, it will give an idea if the sequence works but also, you will know that if printing yourself on double sided paper, page 4 is next to page 13, for example, and on the other side, page 14 is next to page 3. I made this example up by looking at a nearby newspaper supplement, but you get the idea. Of course, is different if not a folded book as also possible to bind single sheets. I could have photographed some examples, but am away from work for the weekend!

banandrew said:

I'll follow that advice and get a dummy together first before trying anything else. What do you look for in the dummy and why do you find it essential? For the ordering/sequencing? And how to section the book?

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i suggest making a scaled down book ( not a dummy/full scale copy )
as an editing tool to make sure everything looks OK, to make sure you are
going to put things in the right order, if you are doing full sheets with 2 pages
so you know what pages are what, and what is on the front and back of each page.
just like with a portfolio your editing is important, with a book the edit is almost more important
because, if you are making 50 copies of a book, and something is screwy ... the whole run is messed up.

that, and because it is fun to make a tiny book. if the images are small enough ( like jewel prints )
you can glue them in the pages, use needle and thread and a piece of card stock and actually make a tiny book
you can see how it feels with them all bound, and working together cohesively.
that, and because it is easier to work with things in hand, than in cyberspace, whether it is writing a important document
or putting together a portfolio / book of images.

good luck !
john

ps, don't forget a book doesn't just start, there are endpapers ( mentioned already by mike crawford ) and "front matter"

Here are some thoughts about producing a photo book, although I haven't started actually doing the work yet. Converting analog images to digital ensures consistency. It certainly facilitates two-side printing, resizing, editing, and making dummies. My Epson 3800 or other quality printers should suffice. Page numbering helps in assembling the book, and is useful if the images are keyed to supplementary text. When the presentation of the images is more important than the images themselves, binding becomes important. Otherwise, spiral binding might suffice. My first try will be with three-hole punching and a loose leaf notebook. That should help in planning a more finished product.

Echoing the suggestions of making some sort of mock-up of the book, a few years ago I was lucky enough to visit an exhibition of the current, original and pre-production maquettes of Koudelka's "Gypsies". The first layouts were done with what looked like contact-prints, from 135 !! They still showed the basic layout and the effects, subliminal or otherwise, of pairing up different images or using foldout pages within the basic book layout.

For your purposes, with current technology, using a laser-printer and a temporary binding would be ok for the roughs, or maquettes -- and cheap enough to produce several different versions without the costs disturbing your sleep...

Edit: It might also be interesting for you to investigate the 'zines' idea. Basically a lower-printing-quality-than-a-book, magazine-style, soft-cover production. You could even end up with one handmade book edition and one very sellable 'zine' edition of the same content.