I was determined from the outset to keep track of my expenditure: there is a curious sort of excitement in working to a budget, and the magic figure of 100 books meant that any purchase could immediately be reckoned ‘per book’ which had the effect of reducing large numbers to gratifyingly small ones – thus, Gargantua the Chinese Guillotine (who deserves and will get a chapter to himself) added a mere 60p a book, since his retail cost of £80 was reduced to £60 thanks to the Am*z*n vouchers I was given for feeding the downstairs cats for a week (kindness does pay).

I’m a writer, so I invent names for things which may well have names already. In my scheme of things ‘recovery cost’ was what I would need to recover from sales to cover all my expenditure, including hardware; my aim was to keep that below £1000, i.e. £10 per book. The other was consumable cost, the amount I would have to spend in the making of each book – the unit cost, if you like, which would be a truer index of profit per book, since I got to keep all the hardware and could use it again.

Of course, my time did not come into the costing. As I said, I’m a writer – if you have taken over ten years to get something into publishable form, costing your time will only depress you. No doubt I would have taken my time into account had I been working for someone else, but here I was working for myself; besides, I could set my time against a couple of things I wasn’t having to do. The first was stand in a queue behind various middlemen and women – shopkeeper, distributor, printer, publisher, (agent) – who reduced the 8.99 the customer paid in the shop for my first book to 67p by the time it reached me (as a matter of fact, my first three books were unagented. I can only say that I gained no benefit from having one for my fourth). The second were the anxious days and hours spent in hawking my finished manuscript about various people (publishers, agents) and waiting for some sort of response, which genuinely is time wasted when you set all your unsuccessful efforts against the single successful one you may eventually get, if you are lucky.

So here is a list compiled, by the look of things, when the process was fairly well advanced – i.e. most of the actual buying had been done – then dressed up to look pretty:

As you can see, this includes some expenditure that proved unnecessary – the ‘beech boards’ from IKEA were a typical ‘magpie’ purchase – two handsome-looking chopping boards that I thought might served as an aid to pressing books at various stages. I did use them, but in the event they exuded oil, so that any paper next to them became stained, so I abandoned them and used Encyclopaedia Britannicas instead. The bulldog clips were intended to substitute for a vice or press to allow the signatures to be sawn, but in the end a purpose-built frame and clamps proved more useful. The paring knife, a lovely thing, served to persuade me that hand-trimming 100 books was not going to be practical, so I bought the big guillotine instead. I had bought a small guillotine, not listed here, for about £15, but it proved too flimsy to be of much use.

So, the figures above suggest a ‘recovery cost’ of £8.43 per book and a consumable cost of £4.90, well within target, and including some things I need not have bought as well as some surpluses such as boards, tape and thread, where I bought more than I needed for economy. The only thing I underestimated was glue, but there again I had initially bought costly specialist stuff from Hewit’s but might as well have bought a larger cheaper quantity from Wickes, as I did latterly.

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Ah, Endpapers!

They are lovely, as you can see here  

a sample of endpapers from J. Hewit & Co

and here

However, you pays for what you gets: the Hewit’s range pictured above come in at £3.96 per sheet (inc VAT) where a sheet is 480mmx680mm: with each book requiring 2 A4 size sheets* (210 x 297) then you will not get more than four endpapers per sheet, with a fair bit of unavoidable wastage. That means that for 100 books you will require 50 sheets. Even with a bulk discount, you will still pay 3.24 a sheet, or £1.62 a book. A total of £162 makes endpapers the costliest item after the printer (£210) – and of course that is a one-off that you get to keep, whereas endpapers, as a consumable, are a recurring cost.

It is at this point that you begin, for the first time as a writer, to have some sympathy with publishers, and to realise that the streak of hard-hearted meanness that you complain of in them is in you also. You agree that the endpapers are beautiful but the cost makes you suck air in through your teeth. £1.62 a book! Surely that could be brought down a bit?

So off you go, scouring craft shops. You find that there are no end of books of fancy papers to be had at reasonable cost – and in the right size, too – but the patterns are all too big. This may be a matter of personal taste, but for me an endpaper pattern has to be on a small scale: once it gets beyond a certain size, it doesn’t work. Even eBay, generally a good bet for craft stuff (though quality cannot be guaranteed, so caveat emptor) yielded nothing to suit.

Fortunately I am married to a wife who (as our children remark) is able to lower the price of goods in any shop simply by entering it. She it was who found the remaindered packs of decorative paper in the bargain bin at Hobbycraft Dundee at a pound a shot so furnishing enough for 75 books at a cost of £30, or 40p a book – a substantial saving on £1.62, leaving a lot more of my £10 production target to spend on other things.

Of course, this saving was achieved at a cost of another sort: the papers were mixed, so there would be no uniformity across the production run, and although they were each attractive enough, some were more striking than others; but when you are doing a limited run of handmade books, singularity becomes a plus-point, making each rare volume rarer still.

a variety of McAvinchey endpapers, one incorporating flower-petals

In the picture above, the blue example illustrates how the remaining 25 books were supplied with endpapers – I encoded a relevant phrase using the ‘ornaments’ range of the Hoefler Text font that I had used to print the book and simply repeated it across a sheet of paper., which I then photocopied on to a mix of blue, green and yellow paper. Since rather simple coded messages play a big part in the book, it struck me as a cheap and cheerful solution – if you didn’t have aesthetic satisfaction from your endpapers, they would at least afford some intellectual diversion:

I think my final word on endpapers is that they are something I would like to experiment further with in producing my own designs; in the meantime I keep a weather eye out for bargain lots of suitable paper from any source. Bookmaking does rather make a magpie of you.

* strictly speaking, your endpapers should be slightly smaller, to allow a small margin of bookcloth all round, otherwise you may have to trim them in situ, which can be fiddly.

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compact desktop printer amid the creative chaos – the end of the sewing-frame can be seen on the right

A printer we have already discussed: clearly it is the heart of the business as far as producing the book itself is concerned. My choice (after some research) was a Samsung Xpress M2885FW, a monochrome laser which did duplex (i.e. double-sided) printing. Laser is more economical than inkjet and gives better quality print. Monochrome is cheaper to run as you only require one toner cartridge as opposed to the four that a colour printer requires. An additional cost with this model is the imaging unit, which requires renewal every 10,000 pages. A factor which influenced my choice was that ‘compatible’ toner cartridges were available at less than a third of the cost of Samsung originals from the excellent Stinky Ink . These (which proved entirely satisfactory) come with a timely warning not to update your printer’s software, since it will almost certainly start blocking non-original cartridges. I will deal with detailed costs for printing in due course, but if you are printing 100 books at 288 pages each, then saving on ink is  a major factor.

A key piece of hardware is a sewing frame. Specialist bookbinding equipment comes into that category of things on which you can spend as much as you wish – much of it  is seductively attractive, but very costly. I am grateful to Jim Poelstra for his excellent website, Affordable Binding Equipment, which persuaded me that making such equipment was well within the range of the enthusiastic amateur. After some further searching I found this straightforward design on the Eden Workshops website, which I gratefully acknowledge.

My own sewing frame was assembled from scrap MDF & wood and some threaded rod, nuts and washers bought from Wickes for under a tenner. It is no thing of beauty but it functions perfectly well.

The other necessity is some form of press, not for printing, but to compress the book at various stages: first, to flatten down the unbound signatures, and also to clamp them for sawing – which is the easiest way to prepare the holes for sewing; next, to compress the book once the signatures have been bound together; and, finally, when it has been cased. Again, there is no shortage of such presses – most specialised to a particular function – to be had, at a cost; very pretty some of them are, too; but in the end I made do with a machine vice and some boards, a few loose weights, and numerous volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I should also mention Glaister’s Encyclopaedia of the Book, a volume I bought some years ago, which proved a handy resource for acquiring some understanding of the terms and processes employed in bookmaking, as well as being of great interest in itself. You can doubtless find much of the information online if you search, but here it is all gathered together in attractive format, ready to hand. There is much to be said for books.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the question of estimating quantities.

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The basic elements of a book are two: the book itself and the case or cover that serves to protect it; bookbinding is the craft of making then joining one to the other.

The case is the simpler of the two. It consists of three boards – front, back and spine – which may be hinged together to form a whole (I followed this practice) which is then covered in material, typically bookcloth or leather. PVA glue is used to stick the various components together.

The process of casing in is illustrated with admirable clarity in this YouTube video by Jacqueline Poutasse which I found very useful, particularly in constructing the basic cover:

The book itself is more complex, being composed of a number of folded sections or signatures sewn together. Though it need not be, this can be done on a special frame, using tapes, which is the method I used, guided by this excellent YouTube video from Bookbinders Chronicle. I would commend all their Bookbinding 101 series, not only for content, but as examples of how instructional videos should be made:

From this, we can deduce that the ‘consumable’ elements that are required to make any book are: paper, ink (toner, in the case of a laser printer), thread, glue, board and bookcloth (or suitable binding material). To this you may wish to add (as I did) tapes (for sewing onto) and mull (a sheet of muslin glued to the spine of the book once it is sewn together) and decorative endpapers. These three elements all combine to make the hinge by which the book and the case are joined. The endpaper is the main element and serves to conceal the other two. It need not be decorative – plain paper will serve – but it is one of those features that greatly enhance the appearance of a book.

These are what must be costed for each book – and that involves working out the quantities needed per book, e.g. how much bookcloth do you require per case? – but some investment in tools and equipment is also required. I have already mentioned the printer, and here we have seen  the desirability of a sewing frame (in fact, I would call it essential, if you wish to produce in any quantity – mine allowed me to sew five books at a time, a useful unit of production). Applying pressure is necessary at various points in the process and you might want to consider the variety of presses on offer, if only to drool over them, but they are not cheap; alternatives can be found, as I will describe in due course. Such things as needles and pastebrushes you might have to hand, but they can be had from the delightful emporium that is J. Hewit & Sons, along with anything else you might need (provided you can afford it).

Another item you will require for large-scale production is a heavy-duty guillotine, an article I will discuss separately – but avoid anything flimsy: rigidity and weight are positive advantages here.

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