Sunday, February 12, 2012

I bound my first book!

Well that was an experience...

After I found a great YouTube video -- (click here to see it) on how to bind my book using glue and a homemade wooden clamp, I then had to figure out how to execute it in terms of setting up my InDesign Document.

1) I mapped out a "dummy" of my book with scrap paper.

2) I reshuffled my InDesign doc to match the dummy I made... and that took a bit of trial and error. I'm sure there is a simpler way to do this, but here's what I did. My book is 5 x 7 so I set up my pages 10w x 7 high, created two columns with a one inch gutter and laid out two pages of my book per one page in InDesign.

My printer was sent from hell to make my life miserable (click HERE for my philosophy on printers) so I had to get creative in printing it out. When I export to a PDF, and try to print to size, my printer automatically resizes it because it likes to make me cry, and the pages printed out the wrong size.

So then I printed it directly from InDesign, but had to do it ONE page at a time and manually flip over the page and feed it back through the printer to duplex it. I can do duplex printing with PDFs but not when printing directly from InDesign.

This is what I TRIED to create to put my book together. It's from the YouTube Video.

This is what my husband Steve made for me

As you can see, with only 12 pages, there wasn't much to glue in terms of width. I used a Q-tip and slathered the glue on.

(The other side of it-- that's the back cover)

Then I folded over the back cover and flipped it over, and held it in place for about five minutes.

The only major issue is that I didn't compensate enough space for the fold over the spine, so you can see where the back cover is a little shorter than the rest of the pages. I'll need to reprint and add an extra 1/8 of an inch.

The inside.
Anyhoo, after I got everything printed out and trimmed, I folded the pages into signatures, stuck them in my new wooden whatsit and glued it all together.






What techniques did everyone else use? If anyone sews their book, can you post some pictures?