With the design finalised and sent off to blurb for printing, I had a short wait before the books arrived, I had decided to order 2 copies of the book, one for the submission and another for myself until the other copy sent for submission is back in my possession, at which point I will have a spare copy with which I might be able to present as part of my portfolio of work or even to publishers on the chance that it might be taken up.
As soon as the books arrived, I opened up the package and inspected the copies of the book to see how they had turned out. Having experience in quality control for printing processes in the past, I knew things to look out for such as noticeable banding on printed pages, ink flecks and dots, pressure marks on pages from rollers etc., and any other noticeable printing errors. The first thing that struck me with the books was the sharpness and quality of the printed plates, I had been worried that given I had been working on a screen when making the images that the backlight would give me inaccurate brightness on the images and they might come out of print very dark and muddy. However, the printed plates came out nice and bright, very sharp, with good tonal ranges, so much so that I was seeing details and relationships between elements that I had not noticed until seeing them realised in print. This was a very relieving outcome and I felt pleased with the work I had made being successful in printed form not just projected and digitally.
The warnings generated during the design phase were on my mind when inspecting the books, first up was the cover image, the warning here was that the image might be low resolution and may come out blurry or fuzzy, however in the preview on the software it appeared sharp and clear, I think here the software had picked up the textured nature of the composition and flagged it as low res pixels or artefacting. Inspecting the cover confirmed this and the image was sharp and not low resolution at all I was pleased with my choice of image and the way in which it introduced the style and theme of my work from the outset without being too direct or giving the game away as it were by showcasing some of the elements and methods I used but not in their full, most effective form. The hardback cover itself was nice and thick and added a satisfying weight to the book, I was affirmed in my choice to abandon the dust jacket (something I despise in books) and use the printed cover service as the solid and firm nature of the book felt right when combined with the solid and weighted compositions used in the book, something about the annoying, slippery dust jacket that just gets in the way of holding and reading the book, often gets damaged easily leading to a scruffy appearance, and on a more thematic note are just a thin façade that wrap themselves around the book but aren’t attached to the body of work just that to me just feels disingenuous, this is probably just me but still, given the personal nature of the book I wanted to be how I wanted it to be and a dust jacket would not be entertained on my work.
The other flag that I needed to check was the double spread image that went across the gutter of the page. I was relieved to see that it didn’t fall too far into the gutter and was still a detailed and effective spread that broke up the monotony of the layout and made for an interesting addition to the book. If I were to do it again however, I might have planned slightly more ahead and made the image a bit wider in in its composition so the hands sat a bit more definitely on their own page. On one of the copies of the book on this spread there was a small printing defect that looked either like a scratch whilst the ink was being applied or a malfunction of the printer head that resulted in a white scratch mark about an inch long by a couple of mm’s wide, the paper itself was undamaged and there was no obvious sign of a cause for the defect but nonetheless, it would need replacing. Luckily Blurb’s support team are very helpful and after identifying the pages that had the defect in my project (another benefit of having the BookWright design uploaded to Blurb’s database) they agreed to print and ship me a replacement copy at no charge.
(cropped, click for full view)
Overall I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the book and felt that the book was a good summary of my project, its aims, and its message as well as being a pleasant and professional looking artefact that provided an interesting read regardless of how deep the reader intended to interpret each plate. The next steps for me would be acquiring some nice presentation boxes for the submission and long term storage of the books, and potentially getting some feedback on the book to see if the work is effective.
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