5. finishing
Single leaflets and postcards are just trimmed to size on a paper guillotine and usually put into corrugated cartons.
Multi-page leaflets are usually folded to their finished size and then boxed, these can be roll folded (where the pages roll into themselves) or concertina folded (fairly obvious but a zigzag type fold) or a gate fold (this is like a double farmer’s gate meeting in the middle).
When the number of pages becomes too great the job (usually called a brochure at this point) will have a different sort of finishing. The main options are as follows
Saddle-stitching. The sections of a job (usually 16pages or 32page sections) are dropped onto the saddle (a continuous chain which can be 40 or 50ft long) with the chain in the centre of the book, the sections are dropped one on top of the other until all the required pages are present, the chain then goes through stitching heads which put wire stitches (metal staples) through the centre of the book and out onto the spine. A lot of smaller magazines, brochures and Sunday newspaper supplements are done like this. This can also be done on smaller hand stitching machine, where you manually put the document over the saddle and stitch it.
Perfect binding is where the sections are placed one on top of another and while held in a clamp under pressure the spine is milled (sawn) off by about 3mm, this then has glue applied to it and the cover is drawn around the spine while the glue is still wet, It is then trimmed on the foredge and top and bottom.
PUR Binding is similar to the above and follows exactly the same process but uses a different glue which is far stronger (and more expensive) than perfect binding.
Thread sewing, Again this is completed on the same machine – but has all the sections sewn together (to form a book block) before it has the cover drawn on. With this process no milling of the spine takes place at the book is sewn together.
Case Binding, takes a sewn book block (as thread sewing above) and gives you a hard cover, there are two versions of this a) paper over board – which has a printed and normally laminated sheet of paper mounted onto a thick grey board (examples of this are Dandy and Beano annuals) b) Cloth over board – these are real or false cloths that are mounted over a thick grey board and usually have some form of foil blocking for the title and spine (examples of this are desk diaries, Encyclopaedias etc).
Singer sewn: This is a form of binding that is only suitable for lower page numbers (up to about 40pp but depends on the weight of paper being used). This as the name implies puts a row of stitches through the job (exactly as a domestic sewing machine – but larger). This can be sewn down the side of a job (side singer sewn) or can be sewn through the spine (saddle singer sewn). This is a semi-hand operation so only suited to smaller runs (up to about 5000 copies).
3 hole sewing: This is a hand operation where three holes are made through the spine and a thread is put through these and hand tied. This again is only suitable for smaller run work of up to 5000 as it is all done by hand.
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