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I used to make my own books. I stopped for a while because it's a pain in the ass.

I think I might start again.

My first attempt at perfect binding by hand in like 4 years.

So a couple of observations:

1) It's pretty obviously a fucking book.

2) Our color printer is fighting with me again.

3) I did the binding with hotglue, but forgot to smooth it before I applied the cover.

4) I didn't score the cover before I applied the cover even though I know I'm supposed to. I just forgot.

5) I have a fucking glue binder and glue binder sheets in this building right now. Why did I use hotglue?

This is a piece of doctor who fanfiction written to finish Shada, the unfinished Douglas Adams episode.

Adams used Shada as the base for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in the belief that the script would never see the light of day.

Then the BBC released all the finished footage, and also the script leaked, and also the fan fic was published.

Then the BBC released it as a flash animation with the 8th doctor.

Then they animated all the missing bits for the fourth doctor and released it.

Then they had someone else novelize it.

It is, at this point, probably the most accessible episode of classic who.

Anyway, once I'm done repairing this fucking printer it'll be time to go home, but I'll do up a couple more books tomorrow.

Have I mentioned how much I hate Epson printers?

Best prints I've ever gotten 1 time in 10, and a bunch of god awful bullshit 9 times in 10.

New printer should be here by Friday, just in time for me to make Books.

I currently have layout done for the fanfic Shada novel, the Firefly fanfic novel "My Own Kind of Freedom" by Steven Brust, The House on the Borderlands, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Radio Beasts, and The City That Paid To Die (a Spider pulp, and the first book in the lauded Spider vs Empire State trilogy.)

Alright, I'm revisiting book binding.

Bookbinding instructions

We have a large printer, I have a matte card stock at 8.5x14 (American Legal) and I'm printing covers.

The process works like this: Print the book in "booklet" form at digest size (or nearly so, when accounting for formatting) on a laser printer.

Cut the booklet in half using our large, manual ream trimmer.

Print the cover on the color printer (inkjet on card stock)

clamp the booklet together and rough up the spine a bit with some sandpaper.

Trim a glue binding strip to size so that it covers the spine.

Score the cover on either side of the spine, using the glue binding strip as a guide.

Stick the text block in the cover against the glue binding strip and drop the whole thing in the glue binder.

Wait approx three minutes.

Remove the whole thing from the glue binder and trim between 1/8 and 1/4 inch off the top, bottom, left and right sides (depending on how the file is laid out) so that you get appropriate margins.

Optionally coat the cover in a PVA glue (like modpodge) such that the cover is more durable and water proof.

Bookbinding results

Here are some of the books we've bound.

I'm not 100% certain that the images for two of these covers are in the public domain.

I am 100% certain that one of them isn't, and I shouldn't be using it.

Bookbinding results

Some more pictures

I'm not very experienced in bookbinding.

This is the first time I've done it in 3 or 4 years, and that time 3 or 4 years ago was the first time I used this method.

I've tried *lots* of other methods over the years, and this is absolutely the first batch I've done that universally feels like it could have come off a shelf.

Even the ones I made using these techniques several years back mostly came out with lots of inconsistencies and problems, but this batch is pretty much exactly where I want it to be.

Now! I could improve this by printing two books at one time, each on half the paper, so that we weren't splitting the grain of the paper in the middle.

I could improve it by using different paper for the covers.

I could do better internal typography.

But uhhhhh all of those things are significantly more work (or expense) than what I'm doing now, and the gains are marginal.

These are books that look like books.

Using the correct equipment they can be produced in ~15 minutes, and more than half of that is waiting on printing or glue to dry.

If I print as a background process, and focus on Trim, Score, Tooth, Glue, Trim as the time investment, we can reasonably do 4+ books in half an hour.

Let's call it 10 an hour for easy math. I've never done 10 in an hour, but I've never actually spent an hour binding books using this method (those four, plus the one I did last week, are the only books I've done with this method so far.)

10 an hour. $15/hour.

That's $1.50 in labor per book.

Paper has gotten more expensive since the last time I did this, and is running mostly about 30 cents for a 200 page book. Cover stock is about a quarter. It takes ~10 cents in toner (if you're refilling yourself) and ~10 cents in ink if you're using a tanked printer.

So 50 cents in material, and $1.50 in labor at maximum efficiency.

Now, we'll never be at maximum efficiency. I'm not an efficient person.

Also, this method leaves you with a TON of scraps of tiny paper.

These make great packing material. They're also useful for paper mache.

I've heard that you can also reconstitute them in to new paper, but I've never tried that and it sounds fake. (This is mostly a joke. Making paper is very hard.)

Andrew (Television Executive)

Anyway, in terms of equipment, I got our ream kerchunker for $200 used. It'll cut 500 sheets of paper.

I got our glue binder for $50 used.

Our laser printer is also a cheap used laser. $50 or so, and we refill the toner ourselves (go with a Brother, so the toner and drum are separate.)

I forgot to include the glue strips in my original cost estimate. I bought a pack of them the first time I did this, I have no idea how much it cost. I haven't needed another pack yet.

I can't imagine they're expensive. I wouldn't have gone with this method if they were.

So, you know, $300 in equipment plus a little over $2/book to make books.

The espresso book machine was $75k to lease for 5 years.

Lease.

These books are not identical to what came out of the EBS, and you'd be able to tell which was which at a glance, but they are in no measurable way *worse* than the books that came out of the EBS.