A few weeks ago, we gave a brief overview of the different kinds of binding that Village Copier has to offer. This week, we’re going to delve further into how to set up a perfect bound book so you can have profession and sleek presentations and portfolios.
Perfect Bind Basics
A perfect bound book is made up of double sided body pages, glued and held together by cover that wraps around the entire book. The cover is affixed by using a hot flexible glue. If you were to take a part a perfect bound book, it would look a little something like this:
Setting up Perfect Bound Book
The most important thing to remember about setting up a perfect bound book is that your body pages and your cover need to be in TWO different files. This is is because the cover needs to be set up as a spread and the body as single pages. We’ll go over setting up both below!
The Cover
1. The width of the cover needs to be double the width of the body PLUS added space for the spine. Essentially, your cover should be one spread with the front and back cover with space in between for the spine. Generally, you should leave 1/8″ of an inch of space for the spine, but that could change depending on how thick the book is.
For example, if your body is 8×10 inches, your cover would be 16×10 inches. If you have 50-75 pages, you would add 1/8″ inch for a total cover size of 16.125×10. If you have 100-200 pages, you would add 1/4″ of an inch for a total cover size of 16.24×10.
2.When laying out the cover please remember to place the front cover on the right hand side of the spread and the back cover on the left side of the spread. Your final cover file should be laid out something like this:
If your cover is 2-sided, please note that the opposite applies for the inside cover, so your front inside cover will be on the left and the back inside cover will be on the right.
PLEASE NOTE:
The maximum length of the spine(the edge that gets bound) cannot exceed 12 inches. The maximum width that we can print double-sided is 18 inches. Anything larger than that we have to print on our oversize printer, and that cannot print double-sided.
The Body Pages
Setting up your body pages is quite simple. Just remember to export them as single pages with crops and bleeds!
