Glas Printing In Progress

In case you were wondering, this is what digital offset printing looks like.

Page Bros, my printer in Norwich, UK, uses a huge HP Indigo digital offset printer. This method combines the flexibility and speed of digital printing with the accuracy and resolution of litho printing. As you can see, it is throwing out pages of Glas at an incredible rate.

There is a huge amount of preparation work to get to this stage. Once the final PDF file containing all the “artwork” for Glas is ready, in itself a labour of love, the file is sent to Page Bros. They create a “digital proof” of the file as it will be printed, and also print out every single page on the selected paper (170gsm silk) and send it to me for checking. This “unbound proof” is absolutely the last stage before pressing “go” and printing the whole book.

But it isn’t quite ready yet. Page Bros then need to assemble the pages in the right order for printing. I am using a sewn binding, meaning that as well as both sides of the paper being printed, the order of the pages is crucial. In this form, the pages are not sequential as they are printed, so page 52 may be printed next to page 73 on the same sheet. This is because the pages are all then assembled (“gathered”) and stacked before sewing such that the proper page sequence is restored. Batches of pages are then folded and sewn before being stuck into the binding hard cover.

It is fantastic to see Glas coming to fruition. After 17 years of work, the final article composed of just 75 individual copies, all signed and numbers, is close to completion. To order your copy, go to www.lens57.com/glas.