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Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)

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Re: Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)

#41

Post by noufalibrahim »

Yetanfou wrote: post #40
noufalibrahim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very interesting. Do you have any pictures of these books or your press? I'd be very interested in seeing them.

I still have the books hidden away in a box in the barn. The press did not survive the onslaught of ages or rather the need for its constituent parts, it has been recycled. Of course this all took place in a time when photography was still analogue and there was no venue to easily show this type of project to the world at large, i.e. no pictures were taken. Alas.

Alas indeed. :(

Re: Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)

#42

Post by Double_a_92 »

mallaidh wrote: post #31
542458 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At very least there are some modernizations you could do for text legibility. Screens are bigger now, and today lines of text that run the entire width of the page are unnecessarily difficult to read. Similarly, with more screen real-estate you could pump up that font-size and line spacing a bit.

I'm having none of these problems, it's more legible than all of the "modernized" websites I've seen. Reasonable serif font, pure black text, pure white background. More legible than any posts on here, with the choice of gray text for certain things.

The line length is the main problem i would say.

Re: Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)

#44

Post by dredmorbius »

mallaidh wrote: post #26
Double_a_92 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would just need a bit of CSS to make it look modern without making it slower.

Why does it need to look "modern?" If it's not broken, why try fixing it?

I've just tweaked the page with:

    body {
	    width: auto;
	    margin: 2em auto;
	    max-width: 40em;
	    font-size: large;
	    line-height: 1.4;
	    background-color: #fffff8;
    }

    * {
	    line-height: 1.4;
    }

Re: Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)

#45

Post by dredmorbius »

MichailP wrote: post #5

Now this is an ideal crowd and topic to ask a question that is niggling me for a long time. What paper could you use with regular laser printers to get professionally looking printed book? The regular A4 is just too thick, and books printed this way look clumsy.

A few things.

Typical laserprint paper is pulp, more especially so for recycled paper. Archival stock is rag and acid-free. Back in the day, this was required for thesis and dissertation submissions, for archival purposes -- rag paper will disintegrate in time.

The other factor, though, are the size of the sheets and how they're assembled. For blunt edge-glued paperback or perfect covers, this isn't a big deal, but a printed book is produced on signatures, which are sets of sheets sewn together, and generally in quarto (four impressions per side) format (eight impressions total including the verso). Octavio is another standard, though generally for books of smaller dimensions.

You're not going to get a sewn-book feel from A4 or US Letter sized paper. And I don't think even running up to larger A3 will quite work, you're looking at about A2 for a proper quarto. Though this is out of my depth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216

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