(The wilds of my office, that is.)
Today I received my preordered copy of Lord Whimsy’s The Affected Provincial’s Companion, and it is exceedingly lovely. I showed it to our production god, who had never seen a two-color stamp before and immediately thought it would be a nice look for some gift edition of something that’s in the queue. I asked him if it costs less to do an all-over case stamp than to print a jacket, and he was pretty sure that it was so. The foil is billed based on the area covered, so an all-over stamp will cost more than a spine alone, but stamping a spine costs only about $75, whereas making a single correction to a jacket—and how often is there just one correction?—costs $125. And that’s not to mention printing in four colors, embossing, and laying foil over that, all of which we often do.
A few hours later, the rep for the printer that did Lord Whimsy’s book stopped by, and my guy introduced him to me and asked how the stamp was done. The printer rep called the dark green layer “pigment” and pointed out that the case required three stamps: one for the dark green, one for the gold, and a blind stamp for the rectangle on the back into which a printed two-color panel on glossy paper is glued. Fine detail gets lost in stamping with foil, so all the back cover text, as well as the all-important bar code (which is referred to on the back as a “mercantile excrescence”), is printed on paper and pasted down.
It’s also worth noting (to me, at least) that the endsheets are printed with two spot colors on cream stock, not one ink on colored paper, as I would have supposed. And the endbands match the red of the endsheets almost exactly. On the whole, it’s a ravishing package, and I’m glad I have a long bus ride ahead of me in which to start reading it.
And where, you might ask, am I busing to? TypeCon! Woo! If you’ll be there, look for the dork with the press-on vinyl letters on her nails:
I like the letters. They remind me of the the “love / hate” tattoos on the preacher’s hands in “Night of the Hunter.” In other words, terrifying. But in a good way.
Aw, jealous. Always wanted to go to TypeCon.
Yes, the l-o-v-e/h-a-t-e tattoos were an direct inspiration. I was also thinking of Sarah Brown’s r-e-a-d/w-e-e-p version.
Incidentally, my letter “r” peeled off at some point during my incredibly long, arduous trip to Boston. I had to carve a new one out of scrap paper. . . .
[…] If you were at all interested in the recent posts about bindings—or if you just like to look at pretty things—do visit the University of Rochester’s exhibit Beauty for Commerce: 1890–1910: This exhibit chronicles the growth of English and American publishers’ binding from its infancy in the 1830s to its decline in the early 20th century. Highlighted are the distinct changes in design that reflected not only technical innovations in the means of book production and decoration but shifting social and cultural trends as well. Viewed as a group, publishers’ bindings represent a revolution in the history of the book. Viewed individually, each binding offers an often gilded window to the fashion of its day. […]