Printing a Beautiful (and Shiny) Book

Yesterday was a pretty great day. In the morning I sent the files for my paperback novel off to Bookmobile, an esteemed local bookmaker in Minneapolis. In the afternoon, I was able to visit Bookmobile’s open house and see the place where my book will be printed! It was amazing!

Bookmobile has about 50 employees who work to design, prepare, print, store, and distribute books for small and local presses who need “short run printing,” which essentially means printing a small quantity of books at a time.

In the production room, I was able to see the giant spools of paper (almost as tall as me!) that feed into the machine that digitally prints the book’s interior pages. It all looks a lot like something from Star Wars, with big blinking buttons and mysterious levers and dials.

Then I saw the machine that prints the book cover, the lamination process, and the process of perfect-binding the book. Essentially the stack of interior pages is run across a gluey wheel, and the cover is clamped on. All of this is meticulously done one book at a time by an operator who is assessing the quality of each book at each step.

Sean at Bookmobile showing me how the gold foiling machine works.

Finally, I was able to see gold foiling process, which I was super interested in since Wick and Arrow will be gold foiled on the front, spine, and back. Bookmobile has two foiling processes. They offer traditional foil stamping, which means a metal plate or die is created with the foil design and each book is “stamped” with the hot die pressing foil into the cover. But because my cover foiling is so intricate, it will use a new process called digital foiling.

In a stroke of luck, I was able to talk with the guy who recently developed Bookmobile’s digital foiling process, and he was very proud and excited to show me how it works. The book cover is first printed and laminated without the gold foil layer. Then it is run through the printer again and a new layer of black toner is added for only the foiled areas. The toner is heated until it becomes sticky. Then it is run through the machine where a sheet of gold foil is pressed over the sticky black toner. When the foil sheet is removed, the gold adheres to the cover wherever it has stuck to the toner, allowing for much more intricate foiling than the traditional stamping process.

Here is a mockup of what my paperback cover (complete with French flaps) will look like with all the foiling:

As I said, I had submitted my interior design files to Bookmobile that morning. When I arrived that afternoon, an employee said, “Oh yeah, I saw your files come through. I checked them out and they were formatted correctly with no errors, so we’re ready to begin printing as soon as we get your cover files.” It was so amazing to talk to real people in person and realize they are as invested in crafting a beautiful book as I am. Thank you, Bookmobile!