Book blocks. Hope this makes sense, it’s a hard thing to describe. Book blocks are the dummy books that we make using the paper chosen for the text and plates in order to have the bindings made and check every page is correct. Usually it is pretty straight forward, either the plates are to be tipped in as cut plates upon the page, as we did for something like Dorian Gray or tipped in as full bleed images tipped into the gutter. With frozen Hell we’re trying something a bit different. I wanted Greg’s foldout plates, some are four-page plates, to not have a gutter. There are a number of ways to minimise the folding into the gutter, if the plate was in the middle of a section, it would have stitching down the centre but would fold out nicely, however the image often was in the wrong place, you have to adhere to the folding of the section, not what is best for the story. Or you could tip in the plate from the edge and one folds out the image but it is glued to the gutter. We wanted to have the folding out on one side or both to be part of the experience of revealing the picture.
There is an old way of doing these foldout plates. It is still used by maps in books that are bound. It involves stitching a tab into the sections. And then gluing the plates to the tab enabling a relatively gutter free experience of the image. This meant that sections, which have to have 8, 12, 16 pages, have to include in that number the tabs. Because the paper for the letterpress printing would be different from the paper Greg selected for the plates, it would prove to be an incredibly complex dummy, and book, for Ludlow and Rich Tong to create.
It also meant that the single plates would also have to be sewn in too because if we tipped them in it would not help the book open properly.
Their first attempt was a bit of a disaster, three months waiting for it and we’d have to start from scratch again.
In order for everyone to understand how the sections printed with the text would work with the multiple plates I created a mock dummy which showed the way in which they would be stitched together. Starting from an 8-page text section, which allowed us to put a 16-page section together with another 8 pages of tabs and single page tabbed in plates!
All this means is that a another very complex arete/lyra production and should end up being a good reading experience. By the time you have the book in hand I hope none of this work will be seen.
All this is working also with two, possibly three different sized books, if we do a Fine edition, which we are still considering, essentially three completely different books!
