If you're going to hire a printer you have to be ready to get into a relationship. It's more serious than the one you have with your plumber or snow plow guy, but less involved than what you have with a long-term significant other. You're not living together, but you're not seeing other people either (things will become complicated and expensive if you do).
I got lucky in finding my printer early in the process of searching for a partner to help me make "THE OBSERVER'S GUIDE TO JAPANESE VENDING MACHINES." I had two constraints my ideal partner had to meet: they had to have the skill and capacity to produce a fine art book and they had to be within driving distance. There was a match just across the border in Montreal, not far from the best donut shop in the city.
As in any modern relationship, the printer and I messaged back and forth for a week or two before meeting in person. Then on a cold February day, I drove up to a large nondescript building surrounded by construction in Montreal's Mile End neighborhood and met a man named Gabriel. Gabriel gave us a tour around a facility full of gigantic machines fine-tuned and specially calibrated for laying ink onto surfaces. In the back resided the HP Indigo 10000, a printer that looks like the office version of an HP scaled up to the size of a living room. This thing, Gabriel assured me, could make my book.
But there were a lot of steps and decisions before that would happen. On that first trip, Gabriel showed off examples of books they'd made in the past and unveiled paper swatches and folders full of potential cover materials. Somewhere between Enviro-Paper and Cialux it started to sink in that making a book was going to take longer than I'd thought.
Gabriel and I emailed back and forth constantly through the spring and then in mid-summer, I finished the design. I sent him the final file and he told me a proof would be delivered to me a week later. That week came but the proof didn't, so I sent another email. What gives, Gabe? It was August now, and like other Montrealers, the printing technician was on his extended summer break. Gabriel was about to take his too, so the process would have to pause for a few weeks. Communication being key to all relationships, I conveyed how this all made me feel: frustrated, more than anything. Gabriel apologized — and attached a photo of himself beaming over the monster salmon he'd caught on his trip. Damn, I thought, that is a nice-looking fish.
I received the proof eventually and by mid-September I was back in Montreal watching the first pages come off the press. A bearded man named Eric single-handedly operated the room-sized printer, which would have to run for six hours to bring the book into being, one signature at a time (a signature is a group of pages all printed on one sheet that then gets cut, folded, and bound to become a chunk of the book). That cutting and folding wouldn't happen here though, it would happen at the bindery, the biggest in Quebec. Once every signature is cut and folded, the binders will stack them up into their correct order and sew them together to make a book block. They'll send those back to Mile End, where a specialized art bookmaker will paint the edges. Those will then go back to the binders, who will wrap the cover boards in the bookcloth I've chosen for the project, fold them over the edges and glue them in place, and, finally, employ a machine that uses heat and pressure to stamp the design onto the front and back.
The finished books will then go back to the printer, and so will I. The whole process takes roughly a month, and we're at the last stages of that process as I write this — I can almost hear the debossing machine hissing up across the border as it imprints images of vending machines onto the back of every book. Soon my relationship with the printer will end, but this will be cause for celebration, not the remaking of identity with questionable hobbies that won't take or the downloading of "the apps."
Speaking of celebrations, if you're in Vermont in early November, please come to the book release party in Burlington. Here's the poster and all the details:
You’re Good. A different kind of adventure. Can’t wait to hold my very own copy, and enjoy the visual, the texture, the smell? and the sound of flipping pages…