How Books Are Made
- 1. 3-6 months before printing
- 2. Step 1 The author submits a neat, typed manuscript, usually in microsoft word format. While this is a common digital file type, it is insufficient for our purposes. We require a hard copy of all incoming material, so the very first thing we do is to print it out on one of our printers, affectionately known as ‘the girls’.
- 3. Step 2 Now that we have a hard copy of the book, we can proceed with the work. We carefully pin each page in turn to the wall of the office. It is for this reason that we print our initial proofs single-sided.
- 4. Step 3 Now the work begins. Over the next 3-6 months, various staff members will take it in turn to swear at, verbally abuse, and flip the middle finger to the wall and its printouts, in a process known as “editing”.
- 5. Step 4 Once the editor is satisfied that enough vitriol, scorn and hatred have been thrown at the sheets, they are carefully removed from the wall. Note that tongs are now necessary to handle the paper, as the pages are now toxic to the human body and soul.
- 6. 1 hour before printing...
- 7. Step 5 This is where the DTP staff gets involved. First, the designer is woken up. If necessary, they are turned on their side to ensure they don’t choke on their own vomit, and any empty vodka bottles are removed from their immediate vicinity and sent for recycling.
- 8. Step 6 The pages are carefully and delicately run through the sheet-fed scanner. This turns the pages from hard-copy versions into digital versions. This new digital version of the book is imported into a layout program known as InDesign.
- 9. Step 7 The shortest step! This usually only takes 15-20 minutes, so that’s really all the lead time we actually need on a project. In this step, we use InDesign’s “Make Pretty” filter to turn the book from plain text into a vibrant, structured, colourful masterpiece. The next few pages will show you the Make Pretty filter in action.
- 10. Below is the original document more or less as it appears after being imported into InDesign. This is the file we will run the Make Pretty filter on.
- 11. Here is the filter at a mere 20%. Notice how it has broken the file up into paragraphs, and has applied a more appropriate font.
- 12. At just a few percent more, it has already started adding colour to the document.You have to be delicate with the slider, it’s very effective.
- 13. Shit, too far.
- 14. Final step: Delivery of the book to the press
- 15. Once we’ve applied the Make Pretty filter, we just have the final step of getting it to the printing press. The most common way of delivering it is to burn it onto a DVD. This disc is generally treated with great reverence, as it contains the sum of all our work for the past few months. The disc is handled delicately and respectfully right up to the point where it is thrown with great force, in anger, at the printing technician’s face. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t yell “Stop the presses!” when we get there! Oh no, in this digital day and age, the sentence you’re most likely to hear is “there’s your fucking disc, i hope you choke on it”.