A short video showing the letterpress printing process on the Vandercook:

The printing process

The finished result. It’s worth all of the work. Now repeat these steps 299 more times…

Here’s a short video showing the printing process on the Albion handpress:

Once I have a rough text layout, I create a collection in Lightroom that contains all of the images that I’m considering for inclusion in the book. Then I export the images at a low resolution for importing into InDesign. The low resolution files will later be replaced by high resolution tif files for printing.

The next step is easy to describe — this is the real creation of the book. I start dragging images from Bridge into InDesign. I move the images around and resize them. I move pages around in InDesign. I look for relationships between images – colors, shapes, narrative details.

When the book layout starts to solidify I create a small dummy on cheap paper to see how it looks and also to see how the signatures will be assembled.

Then I go back and look at the layout and see how I can improve it. And I keep doing this until the layout is finished.

After the selection of images, my focus in my new book was how the images would be laid out on the page. My first book “This Is Not My Sky” had one image per page with a static layout that was repeated for each image. This is somewhat of a standard layout for photobooks. It allows the viewer to concentrate on the content of the photographs because the layout doesn’t draw attention to the graphic design of the book. This type of layout is fits certain photographs/books but I feel that it’s important to be open to other options when appropriate.

A static layout doesn’t take advantage of the possibilities available when you consider the book page to be an extension of the picture plane of the photographs. Is it possible to accentuate the visual and conceptual relationship between photographs? By including multiple images per page and by varying the size and position of images on the page we can explore these relationships. This is especially appropriate for my new book where I’m pushing my understanding of how light, shadow, and color affect the visual and spatial relationship between objects.

Inspiration

I love photobooks. Looking at them provides inspiration for my photography and informs my photobook making. In designing my new book I’ve drawn inspiration from a few sources that feature dynamic image layouts.

Another source of inspiration is Parr/Badger “The Photobook: A History” vol 1 and 2. I also strongly recommend “Structure of the Visual Book” by Keith A. Smith for ideas of how images can be sequenced.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made some serious progress on my new book. The image selection and layout of the photo pages is nearly complete. Also, I finished the letterpress printing of the text pages and cover wrapper. Now I have some time to continue documenting the photobook creation process.

InDesign

My primary tool for book layout is Adobe InDesign. It’s expensive software but it works well. I also use it for designing my business cards and postcards.

I start by creating an InDesign document with the dimensions of my book. In this case the pages are 8″ wide by 10″ high. I set up the document with .5″ margins which are used as a guideline for the space between the edge of the paper and whatever is on the page (images or text). The margin is a personal preference.

For this book I used a .5″ bleed on the top and bottom and outside. The bleed is trimmed after printing. Since I’m using 11×17″ paper folded in half, each page would be 8.5×11″ untrimmed. For an 8×10″ final size I need to trim .5″ from the top, bottom, and outside. If you have images that extend (bleed) off the page you should extend them out to the bleed line to make sure there is no white space around the edge of the page since there can be variations in the trimming. (If you are having someone print your book you should get more information about bleeds from your printer). I use a 1″ slug at the bottom of the page. This is an area for notes that aren’t printed.

Imposition

This is where things get a bit more complicated. It’s important to understand imposition and the structure of the sheets of paper that make up the book. This is only necessary since I’m printing and binding my own book. It isn’t required for POD books like Blurb.

Imposition is essentially determining how the pages are laid out on the printed sheets of paper.

Part of the imposition process is understanding how the signatures in the book will be put together. Signatures are bunches of printed sheets that are stacked and sewn together to form the book. My first book “This Is Not My Sky” was a single signature, like a program that you would receive at a classical concert or a wedding. There is a limit to the number of sheets of paper that can be combined into a single signature depending primarily on the thickness of the paper; if you have too many sheets in a signature, the book won’t close flat.

For my new book I decided on three signatures with three sheets of paper per signature. This will produce a book with 36 pages (each sheet of paper will have four pages). Balancing a few factors helped me decide this: the paper I’m using for the book is thick (requiring fewer sheets per signature), more signatures means more sewing (fewer signatures is quicker to bind), and I didn’t want to have any sheets with both letterpress text and inkjet images.

So why do we need to be concerned with imposition? If you print out the book pages in order from InDesign, you will have a stack of sheets that when sewed together would create a book with the pages out of order. The sequence of the pages needs to be manipulated in such a way that when the printed sheets are stacked in signatures the pages will appear in the correct order. It’s difficult to explain, but if you look closely at the relationship between sheets of paper and pages in a simple pamphlet, it will be easier to understand.

InDesign has a limited imposition function called Print Booklet, but the least number of sheets per signature is four, so it won’t work for my book. Instead of printing from Indesign, I use a program called Quite Imposing. It’s a plugin for Adobe Acrobat that takes a PDF of a book and rearranges the pages into order for printing. When I print my book I will export a PDF from InDesign, open it in Acrobat, and run it through Quite Imposing to create a new PDF that is imposed for printing in Acrobat.

After I finished my first book, I met Norman McKnight who runs Philoxenia Press in Berkeley, California. He is also a talented photographer; check out his flickr photostream. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Norman and he has been very generous with his time and advice about printing. I will be printing the text for my new book on Norman’s presses.

Last weekend I visited Norman to talk about bookbinding and to look at typefaces for the book.

Size

I wanted the pages to be slightly larger than the half 8.5×11″ pages in my previous book. I went through some photobooks in my collection and decided on a 8×10″ portrait (vertical) format. It feels right and the images can be printed at a decent size. It will also work perfectly with 11×17″ photo paper that is folded in half and trimmed.

When thinking about the size I considered that a bigger size means more money for materials, image pages take longer to print, bigger paper is more difficult to handle, and shipping costs will increase.

Binding

It’s critical that the images in the book be easy to access. I don’t like books with spines that feel like they will crack in half when they are opened. Or worse, books that are difficult to open to see the images. My first book used a pamphlet binding which is great for readability but it is limited in the number of pages it can handle. For the new book I want something thicker that has more presence on the bookshelf.

I looked at a few different binding styles. Japanese bindings are beautiful but the ones I’ve seen are too much of a compromise in terms of being able to open the book. I decided on a multi-signature pamphlet binding with a slip cover (I’ll talk more about the technical details of the binding in a future post).

Number of Pages and Signatures

I won’t know the exact number of pages in the book until I’m done designing the layout, but I wanted to start out with a rough idea. Signatures are the groups of folded papers that make up the book (in certain types of bindings). My friend Norman McKnight suggested having a signature at the beginning of the book for the letterpress text. I will probably have 3 signatures each with 3 sheets of paper. This will provide 36 pages in total with a max of 24 pages of images.

Paper

For my last book I used Epson Premium Presentation Matte Double-Sided paper for the photo pages. I like the paper but it’s only available in 8.5×11″ so it isn’t an option for this book. Norman McKnight kindly provided me with a list of double-sided photo papers that he had compiled. From his list I chose Moab Entrada Natural 190gsm mostly because I wanted a natural paper (which isn’t as bright white as the “bright” version) that was slightly thinner. I will probably use the same inkjet photo paper for the text and image pages where in the previous book I used Crane’s paper for the text. I haven’t decided on the cover or dust jacket paper yet.

I went through a conceptual period a couple of years ago but I am not a conceptual artist. I’m now shooting instinctively without preconceived ideas for projects.

So over a period of months of taking photographs I noticed connections developing between the images and started thinking about how they might come together in a book.

Naturally, the new book has a relationship with my previous photography, and especially with my first book “This Is Not My Sky” (pictured above).

The first book was an experiment in many ways. I wanted to know:

• if I could complete a large project like making a book by hand
• if I could combine the labor intensive processes of hand-set letterpress printing, inkjet photograph printing, and hand binding to make a high-quality book in a limited edition without an artificial constraint on the number of copies
• if anyone would be interested a book of my photography

I managed to finish the book and it sold out quickly. I was happy with it as a first attempt. It was a learning experience, and after it was all over there were a number of things I wanted to change in my next book:

• include images that are more representative of my photographic vision
• develop a more sophisticated layout that varies from page to page
• increase the number of images
• make the book thicker necessitating the use of a different binding

Over the last few months I’ve been shooting mostly with hand-held small cameras while walking around in San Francisco and Oakland. These are the images I will use for my new book.

In the last three months lots has changed in my life in both personal and photographic realms.

I am moving from Oakland to San Francisco. It’s been 10 years since I lived in San Francisco and damn I’m excited to move back. As vital as the art scene is in Oakland, it doesn’t have much of a photographic component. And I’m ready to take advantage of the visual possibilities present in the city.

In September I am traveling to Paris for the Publish It Yourself DIY photobook exhibition put together by Laurence Vecten of LOZ. In preparation for PIY I am making a new photobook that I will show at the event.

As I put together the new book over the next month I will document my bookmaking process here on my blog. I’m hoping that by explaining how I work I might inspire other photographers to publish their own photobooks. Stay tuned.

My Process for Making Handmade Photobooks
I will add more article to this list describing how I make my photobooks over the next month.

1. Concept
2. Format and Materials
3. Letterpress Options