Friday, January 27, 2017

Jim Kasson's Story

ETA: Please note various corrections Jim has generously provided in the comments. It is worth noting that the problematic bindings do appear to loosen up to a state of reasonable lay-flatness, with use, and that the dust covers are holding up just fine. (these remarks will make sense in context, I promise)

In the comments under Ming's "I am making a book" post, this link has been offered up. It gives a really interesting parallax view into the world of making your own book. His process is absolutely, diametrically, opposed to pretty much everything I have done.

The summary, as I read it, is that Jim Kasson had some money available and decided to have an edition of 1000 books printed up. Very nice books. He probably spent in the general area of $100,000 on this, which may seem foolish but I am damned if I can think of a much better way to spend a spare $100,000. But the story is a bit fraught.

Jim hires a book designer he likes, and finds a press that he likes. The design is awesome. Then Jim spends a great deal of time fussing with color and formatting. It turns out that many of his pictures have a lot of what he perceives as important color that is out of gamut for the press and paper he's selected. So he spends a lot of time culling and then re-editing pictures both for crop and color.

It is the cropping that ultimately leads to a lot of trouble. He and his designer decide that they need to print things across the gutter, which means they want a more or less lay-flat binding, which the bindery used by the selected press basically cannot do reliably. There's a lot of discussion and fussing with dummy books, and sometimes the bindery gets it right and sometimes they don't. They promise to get it right on the order of 1000 books, and they do not. Well, that sucks. Ultimately, I suspect that the spines loosened up under use and the books looked OK.

Don't print across the gutter if you care about what your pictures look like. If your photos are content-driven, you might be OK as long as content isn't getting lost in the gutter, but it's still not a great solution. I am surprised that Jim's designer did not suggest that they walk away from the bindery somewhere in this process. Lay-flat bindings are not rocket science.

One other minor point. Jim wants the cadillac book, so he orders up french folded dust covers, which are a nice touch. Then he notes, somewhat pedantically, that there's a sharp-folded corner that might catch on things, or something, and asks what the press can do about it. This is the answer they came up with which I got to say I hate. The die cut rounded corner puts a sharp point into the cutout region, pretty much guaranteeing that under any sort of use the dust cover will tear along the crease. Sharp points concentrate stress.

From where I sit, this is actually a "tell" and suggests that perhaps it's time to find a new press. These guys may be great at smearing pigment on paper, but they're pretty bad at paper handling.

Anyways, let's put my experiences with doing blurb books, and hand binding books, together with Jim's story, and see what we can discover.

This first and most obvious thing is that it will pay you will to shoot with your book in mind, rather than trying to fit an already extant project into a book. If your print shapes are all over the place, it's going to be tough, no way around it. This is the root of Jim's big problem, the across-the-gutter pictures that he needs. There's just no way this looks good. Best case, you have a crease in the middle of your picture, worst case you have a bunch of glue and string and the picture all jammed into a dank valley because the book won't open enough.

Interestingly, as the problems with the binding unfold, one thing we do not see Jim doing is taking apart the dummy books that exhibit problems in the binding. I'd have had them apart in 10 minutes, and I would have known what the problem was.

I'm not blaming Jim at all, here, but I didn't find his story surprising. He jumped into the deep end, without really knowing what he was doing.

Let's say you're planning to do something similar, you've got a pile of money burning a hole in your pocket and you can't wait to fill your garage up with books.

First, buy a "build your own journal" kit from some source, such as Hollander's in Ann Arbor, and build it. Read Artemis BonaDea's definitive (and free! just google it!) book on conservation book repair, and take some books apart. It will be fun, and you'll learn a lot. Cost you $100 and a dozen hours.

Do some books on blurb, mypublisher, whatever. If you're working with an independent designer, do a book with them. Blurb, at least, has an InDesign plugin. Yes, these places have a very shallow design palette. Make your designer show you what they can do anyways. And, more importantly, get used to the process of working with the designer, of selected and sequencing photos, of proofreading, writing, laying out. Whether you're working with or without a designer, these are all things you'll be doing on the "real" book eventually. Cost you a few hundred bucks and a few dozen hours (plus whatever the designer costs -- a lot more than that, if they're any good, but still cheap at the price).

Now you actually know something about books, both how they're built, how they're written, laid out, designed, printed. You've invested a relatively tiny amount of money and a small amount of time.

Now go find a printer and a bindery. You now, perhaps, know enough to lean on them harder and fire them if need be. If there's one thing clear in Jim's story is that he does not know enough, and if relying primarily on his designer and the printer for guidance at every step. He's learning as he goes, bleeding fistfuls of money at every stage.

Whether he could have gotten a better book, I don't know. Maybe this really is as good as it gets, and the best you can hope for is to have 1 or 2 fairly serious issues with the final product. Still, Jim might have saved some money or time, and certainly would have had a better personal experience if he'd gotten into the process with more knowledge up front.

17 comments:

  1. 1000 copies, with no distribution deal? $100,000?? Good grief... This is insane.

    The best advice to any wannabe self-publisher is: FFS use Blurb or some other "print on demand" service. It will cost you the price of one copy, nothing more. You will never, ever sell more than 100 copies, and probably no more than 10.

    The other good piece of advice is to calculate the actual volume occupied by 1000 copies of a book. Do you really have enough space to live with 90% of those for ever? I have seen 1000 books, and it is an awesome sight (and not in a good way).

    Mike

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    1. Yeah.. I think he intended to, and did, give quite a few of them away. There's some stuff toward the end of the series about giving them away as gifts to new members of some Photography Club Thingy. He notes that you can get a membership (or could at that time) for $50, which he notes is less than his cost for a single book.

      This suggests >$50,000 for this adventure, and given the way these things play out if a fellow is pretty sure he's spent $60,000 on a thing, he's probably spent rather more.

      Worth noting, blurb would have solved many of his color issues which start out with "What do you mean they haven't got an ICC profile for their press?" because I think blurb *does*. So, if you're already color managed, you just do the thing that you do, and you're done.

      As opposed to the first 50% of Jim's gyrations which are to guess/estimate the press's profile, followed by gasping at the tininess of the gamut volume (pro-tip: go find another press).

      He has pictures of what 1000 books looks like. It's quite impressive! You definitely don't want to stack that in the upstairs bedroom.

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    2. "Worth noting, blurb would have solved many of his color issues which start out with "What do you mean they haven't got an ICC profile for their press?" because I think blurb *does*. So, if you're already color managed, you just do the thing that you do, and you're done.

      As opposed to the first 50% of Jim's gyrations which are to guess/estimate the press's profile, followed by gasping at the tininess of the gamut volume (pro-tip: go find another press)."

      The GRACoL 2006 gamut is quite sizable as four-color web off set press gamuts go. It is *much* larger than the Blurb gamut. It is much smaller than the Epson 4900 gamut, however. As is turns out, with a bit of editing, I was able to get the gamut mapping done to my satisfaction, to the point where you can lay the 4900 portfolio edition prints alongside the pages in the book where they reside, and both look good. Blurb does nothing to help you do the gamut mapping besides the ICC Procrustean bed.

      "He has pictures of what 1000 books looks like. It's quite impressive! You definitely don't want to stack that in the upstairs bedroom."

      Actually, that's what 600 books look like.

      Delete
    3. Thanks for your corrections!

      I am surprised to learn that blurb's color space is small - I think they're an inkjet shop. Good info!

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    4. "It is much smaller than the Epson 4900 gamut, however"

      The 4900 has green and orange inks, which helps. Why did Pantone Hexachrome bit the dust?

      Delete
  2. Blurb does not use inkjet. They use an electrophotographic printer with liquid toner. When I was a color scientist at IBM, we looked at that technology, and passed on it. Not because it wasn't good, but because the business was outside of our wheelhouse. HP turned it into a good thing for them.

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  3. "So he spends a lot of time culling and then re-editing pictures both for crop and color.

    It is the cropping that ultimately leads to a lot of trouble."

    The gutter-spanning images were the ones that were *not* cropped for the book, but the ones that used their original cropping. This series produced a lot of wide-aspect-ratio images, and I wanted a book that would fit on bookshelves, so I couldn't use a similar aspect ratio for the book.

    There were quite a few images that *were* recropped for the book, and those were cropped to fit as full bleed one-page placements. I gave Jerry a choice of using the original crops and the full-bleed ones for a number of images. I didn't do that with any image for which I didn't like the full-bleed crops.

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    1. The point I was trying to make was that the original shape of the pictures was a source of trouble.

      My assumption, possibly wrong, was that you had a variety of aspect ratios in play.

      If they were all just rather wide, but only some could be reasonably cropped more square, well, I have misunderstood. If that's the case, I think there are other solutions. One could, for instance, design the book to be shelved spine up. This would require a slipcase, of course. Possibly, there are other solutions.

      Regardless, thank you for the ongoing litany of corrections and additions, it's really very interesting and generous of you.

      Delete
    2. "My assumption, possibly wrong, was that you had a variety of aspect ratios in play.

      If they were all just rather wide, but only some could be reasonably cropped more square, well, I have misunderstood."

      There were a bunch of different aspect ratios. Some were quite wide. Others were wider than that. I was pleasantly surprised how many of them could be cropped to full-bleed. In one or two cases, I ended up liking the full bleed crops much better. The cropping experience gave me a new perspective on many of the images.

      And yes, the original shape of the images was what drove us to the double-page spreads. This gave up more than two feet of width to play with, which was really nice. We couldn't have practically made a book that was more than two feet wide (or tall, if we used your spine-up idea, which I never thought of during the design phase).

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    3. Obviously what matters is that you like the final outcome and are satisfied, bravo!

      My remarks here are only to point the way toward entering such a project with a little more knowledge, should someone else choose to take up this particular sword and have a go at it.

      Delete
  4. "1000 copies, with no distribution deal? $100,000?? Good grief... This is insane."

    I won't argue with that. But it was a very rewarding project. $100K is too high, unless you count my time at the salary that I got when I was working for a living.

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    1. The sad truth is that, apart from the output of a few major players from a few prestigious publishers, often squarely aimed at the "collector" market, photo-book sales are small. I was amazed to buy some discounted copies of the well-received and publicised products of the Hoxton Mini Press ("East London Swimmers", etc.) and to find that, far from the fag-end of the very small editions, my numbered copies were still relatively low, e.g. 109/250 for "Swimmers". It's not even as if these books are expensive, at around £30.

      The most I have sold of any my own dozen or so *exceptionally* interesting, beautiful, and well-designed Blurb books is 25 copies... ;)

      Mike

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    2. While I agree that there is a certain madness to it, I will repeat that I think it's an excellent way to spend a pile of money. The world is surely a better place for having a pallet load of attractive books in it. If Jim has to drive across the country stuffing them one by one into those Little Lending Library things people have, well, so be it.

      A little mad, but making art is always a bit of a mad idea.

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    3. To put the expenses in context, this book was the capstone (well, maybe the CPA exhibition was the capstone, but this was the last big thing) of a several-year series that took thousands of hours of my time. And the $100K? I spent more than that on cameras, lenses, airplane tickets, hotel rooms, and drivers over the course of making the series.

      But, yes, mad is probably accurate.

      Jim

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    4. Oh, and about that pallet load of books. There are currently 300 left, and I'm still shipping them out.

      Delete
  5. Here's a writeup on HP's liquid toner EP process:

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/commercial-printers/indigo-presses/lep.html

    They say that they can support a lot of different ink colors. I don't know how many Blurb uses.

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  6. WRT the double page images, this is a snip from an email I received from a very well-known photographer, who I won't identify since I haven't asked for permission to quote him:

    "I think the book is beautifully done. I love the variety in the layout, even some full-bleeds (horrors!) But I have a copy of AA’s Yosemite Valley, done with Nancy Newhall in the 50s, and they did the same thing. Full bleeds, two images on one page, etc. "

    Jim

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