Book Printing Basics

Written By Stephanie Broder

There are so many types of art that can benefit from being turned into a self-published book— including illustration, comics, photography, portfolios, and more—that having a beautiful physical collection of your art is an achievement worth celebrating.

But before you start working with printers, there’s some key terminology you will need to know.

Binding Type - Each type of binding has a technical name associated with it. Some of the most common ones for self-publishing are:

  • Perfect bound: soft-cover books with glued spine

  • Saddle-stitched: sheets are folded in the middle and stapled along this fold to create a spine

  • Saddle-sewn: same as above but instead of staples, the spine is sewn with thread

  • Casebound: hard-cover books, these most often have sewn spines as well as some glue

  • Plasti-coil: loose sheets are hole punched on one edge and threaded with a spiral piece of plastic coil (the coils can come in many colours)

  • Wire-O: loose sheets are punched on one edge with rectangular shaped holes and hooked onto the loops of a metal spine, which is pinched closed

An example of a perfect bound book I created with the help of a local print shop. Only 4 copies were made - even small runs can look professional!

Parts of a Book - It can get confusing as you're working on books and trying to talk about the top and bottom or right and left sides of a book. All of this depends on the presumed orientation! So it’s better to use the correct terms for identifying the parts of a book:

Looking at a book from the front cover we have:

  • Head - the top of the book

  • Face - the edge of the book that opens (usually the right side)

  • Foot - the bottom of the book

  • Spine - the edge of the book that’s sealed (ie. by glue or sewing)

  • Hinge - extra space that allow casebound books to open OR a crease in the cover of a perfect bound book to ease opening

  • Headband - bonus for casebound books, thread may be looped around the edge of the paper to create a decorative edge and hide the internal workings of the spine

  • Book block - the “guts” of the book; all the pages either glued or sewn together

Counting Pages - it is impossible to have an odd number of pages in a book, and I’m going to quickly show you why!

  • Sheet - a piece of paper

  • Page - the sides of the paper you can print on. In other words, one sheet of paper is two pages because it has a front and back

  • Folio - a folded sheet of paper to create additional pages. If you fold a single sheet of paper in half, you now have four pages

  • Signature - nesting folios together to create a larger unit for gluing or sewing the book

See? You can have a single sheet of paper, but printers don’t talk in sheets. They talk in pages. So your page number is always even. Sometimes a page is blank but it is still counted!

Bleed and Bounce - If you do other types of design or print work, you probably are familiar with the term bleed. Bleed is when you extend your image 1/8” beyond the final size of your book. This accounts for a margin of error in printing and final trims. If you don’t include bleed and the final trim is even a hair off, you will see an ugly white line down the side of your print.

Bounce is the reason why bleed (and safe areas!) are extra important for digital printing. Digital print can not maintain perfect register, which means that from sheet to sheet, the prints may move a little bit to the left or right, up or down. So even if your final trim was perfect, a bit of bounce can ruin the look of your book if you don’t have bleed.

If you aren’t sure if your printer is printing digitally, they probably are. Nothing wrong with that! Digital print is good for short runs and fast turnarounds. But always remember - digital print bounces.

Stephanie Broder
Previous

How to Think About Character Design
Next

Top Five Reasons You Might Need an Art Coach in 2024