Author hi-vis at the book factory of dreams - Tracy Darnton

Still warm, first edition Ready or Not

We all have an author bucket list - the things we'd love to do or experience as an author. I was very lucky to tick off one at the top of mine: seeing my next book, Ready or Not, printed. 

So far in life, I've been round the Cadbury's chocolate factory in Hobart, Tasmania and the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California. Yes, there were many edible freebies - which led to child two throwing up in the car park after too many jelly beans - but neither compared to the excitement for a book geek like me in seeing a book printed. Better still, one of my books. 

My lovely publisher, Little Tiger Ltd, had it all planned to go for The Rules in 2020 but then a pandemic came along. This time round, the CPI Books factory in Chatham, Kent had just started readmitting visitors to the site. Phew, for once the publishing gods were in our favour. 

Your books or many of the ones on your bookshelf, paperback and hardback, may well be printed at CPI too. Digital printing for low volume or on demand is at their Wiltshire sites but high-quality lithographic printing takes place at Chatham. (Picture books are generally printed in China due to higher costs.) CPI print around 450 million books per year across their printing factories.

In my excitement, I may not have grasped all the proper technical names for what I'm about to describe so apologies if so. I was too busy watching the conveyor belts go round and round or marvelling at the waterfall of printed paper above my head.

First off, we're going to need some paper. Soooo much paper. 

Their warehouse is constantly emptying and filling with it. Different grains, colours, qualities all selected by the publisher for the particular book. You'll have seen that paper is in high demand and getting more expensive, exacerbated by the high cost of energy and the absence of paper from Russian mills. Swedish and Finnish forests are keeping us in books.

Here's me marvelling at the pristine paper on this 3 mile roll. I'll just say that again - 3 miles! 

This is about to be attached to the printing press containing the huge aluminium plates used in lithographic printing with, in my case, 32 pages (I think!) on each sheet waiting to be inked. 

 

These aren't all consecutive pages because they allow for folding and production of two books at a time. This is where maths and the ability to visualise a deconstructed book really matter for the production team. Thank goodness, this part is above my pay grade because I can't remember whether my book needs to have a number of pages divisible by 32 or 16. Either way, we've ended up with 288 pages. Hence the occasional blanks at the ends of books or in the case of Ready or Not, extracts of my other books. If I were writing illustrated early readers or middle grades rather than edgy YAs, the team would be working out that an illustration on one page means that there should also be one on its diagonally corresponding page on the sheet. OK, brain is hurting. It was complicated and why publishers and printers have a lot of meetings.

Ink is piped in through big tubes and the paper moves so quickly it looks static or like a marvellous, if rather noisy, water feature. 

This huge sheet is then folded and clamped into bundles like this:

These bundles are left to dry before the next stage - binding them together. 

Glue pellets are piped into the well-ventilated machinery and at such a high temperature the glue works instantly binding the six bundles into a very long (ie double) coverless book. 

Glue pellets

Hot glue applied to pages

Next stop - the covers. The cover sheets with two covers on each are printed in their factory in Croydon and shipped to Chatham on the day of printing. It's all a just-in-time logistical process.

Cover stack fresh from Croydon 

Covers loaded into machine

Covers are loaded into the machine and glued and clamped into place on the printed book, now on its side edge. The covers are then folded into place by the machine. This gives a 2 up book block, resplendent in orange, trundling round the double decker conveyor belt. They slowed the process down to half speed so that we were able to see what was going on. 

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that this is still a topsy-turvy double book. So next stop is the cutting machine where it gets cut into two books.

The books are all tilted into the same direction and off on the next conveyor belt to get those edges trimmed. I liked the thwack of books landing on this conveyor belt and the sight of all those books disappearing off into the distance.

Quality control keeps a close eye and rejects any that aren't quite perfectly trimmed before the machine neatly stacks them into piles.

Piles join together as logs to be wrapped in recyclable plastic to protect from sunlight and to more easily transport, and arrive on a pallet.

The forklift driver then takes the full pallet of books immediately onto a lorry to be sent to the distribution warehouse. I'll see them again when I'm sent my author copies to unbox.

We also had a look at how the other half live with hardback printing. I can see why hardbacks are so expensive; so many more processes. If I ever get a collector's edition, I'll ask for the full works: a patterned cloth cover, lined with contrasting colour cloth carefully tucked and folded, printed silver foil spine from a handmade block, head and tail band in striped fabric and a silk ribbon bookmark. Finished with laser-sprayed edges in a funky pattern and a snazzy loose cover with cut-out shapes. Boom. 

We were looked after so well by Kevin at CPI - no jelly beans but plenty of sandwiches and cakes - and a patient willingness to answer all our questions. 

Souvenirs from the day - cover sheets, pages bundle, a 2 up book block and, best of all, literally the first edition of Ready or Not. All you PB and MG authors with puppets and outfits and cuddly toys are sorted for school visits but us YA authors need some props to wave around and I can now waft my 2 up book block. 

Sadly, I didn't manage to sneak out my Author hi-vis jacket. 

Tracy Darnton is the author of YA thrillers. Her next book, Ready or Not,  is definitely out in May. She personally watched over all the copies at the printers. 

How do you make a book? Lari Don

When I visit schools, one of the questions I’m asked most often (usually by 6 year olds rather than 10 year olds) is ‘how do you make a book?’ They’re often very disappointed when they discover that I don’t make books. I just write the words. Someone else does the pictures, and someone else entirely makes the physical book with the actual pages that you turn. I can talk a little about the illustrator’s role, because I’ve chatted to illustrators, and responded to roughs and commented on layouts. But I always have to admit that I have no idea how a book is printed, how the book is actually made, because I’ve never met a printer or seen what they do.

I mentioned this gaping hole in my knowledge to my lovely publishers Floris Books, just once in passing (or perhaps I nagged, I’m not sure), and last week, they organised a trip to a printers and let me tag along so I could learn how a book is made. We went to Bell and Bain in Glasgow, which is the oldest book printer in Britain and the biggest book printer in Scotland, where Tony Campbell gave us a fascinating tour.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. I think of books as quiet things, though I probably shouldn’t because I make a lot of noise killing dragons and shouting ‘bottom!’ when I do book events, but writing and reading can be calm quiet activities.

However, printing is not quiet. The noise in the factory was overwhelming. When one of the printing presses started up right beside me, the hum and vibration was like an aeroplane taking off.

the inside of a printing press

And everything was so big! Books are usually little things you can hold in your hand. But all the machines which make books are great big industrial-sized metal giants.

Bell and Bain is a proper factory, which makes real things, in huge quantities. And for someone who loves books, Bell and Bain is a wonderfully optimistic place. 90 people are employed there and they have recently bought new printing presses (for figures which I won’t reveal but made me gasp.) It’s a thriving business, making books. 7 million books a year…

And here’s how it’s done.

First the digital file from the publishers is turned into a plate. A flimsy wobbly shiny sheet of metal is lasered, then developed with chemicals, so that it’s marked with an impression of the words and pictures the publisher wants printed on the paper. If you are printing black and white, you only need one plate; if you are printing colour, you need four plates (for all the different colours.)

And the plate is huge, because the paper to be printed is huge. A rug-sized sheet of paper, which can fit 32 novel-sized pages on each side. I reckon that about a dozen 10 year olds could sit cross-legged on one sheet of Bell and Bain’s paper. (Yes, ok, doing so many author visits has given me a fairly odd way to judge area…)

a large sheet of paper, scale provided by the powerful hand of my editor Eleanor

So the plates are put in the printing press and the paper is fed though. We saw the biggest press opened up to be serviced. The innards look like the inside of my computer printer at home, but these are the right size for the house at the top of the beanstalk. The ink rollers are amazing, long thick shiny rollers covered in gleaming ink, which is poured over them from bucket-sized pots. I took pictures of all the rollers, but I liked the blood red roller best…

a shiny dripping blood red ink roller

The printing press prints both sides of the papers, that’s why it needs eight presses for colour. But it can do 15,000 sheets of paper an hour. And it's printing all day and all night, 7 days a week.

Bell and Bain have black and white presses too, and we are fairly sure we identified the exact press which printed some of my First Aid for Fairies novels, so I got my picture taken in front of it. (This was much more exciting than getting my picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower!)

my tourist shot - Lari and the First Aid for Fairies printing press

This process is called litho printing (or at least that’s what I scribbled down) and we also saw smaller litho presses for printing covers on card rather than paper, and a terrifyingly fast inkjet digital printer which printed onto rolls of paper rather than sheets.

After the litho printing press has finished, you have all the pages of your book, but they would be easier to sit on than to read. So next the sheets are fed into a folding machine, which I thought was the most fascinating machine in the building. It’s a conveyor belt, but not a straight one: it has lots of corners, and every time the sheet of paper goes round a corner it’s folded, and somewhere in there it’s also cut and perforated, so by the time it reaches the end the rug-sized sheet of paper has become book-sized, with holes along the back. Though it’s probably not a complete book yet, this section or ‘sig’ will be a fraction of the book, perhaps a quarter or a tenth of a book depending how long the book is. The folding machine also has lines of big shiny ball bearings, which are apparently there to stop the paper flying off the belt at the corners, but made me want to play marbles on the factory floor…

the fabulous folding machine - look at those tempting marbles

Then the book is bound. The folded sigs are put in hoppers above the binding machine, dropped down and layered in the right order. Then the spine of the naked book is dipped in hot glue, the glue goes up into the perforations in the pages and the cover is clamped onto the gluey spine. The cover is then folded round the pages, the edges of the book are trimmed to make them neat and tidy, and the book comes out the other end all ready to read.

Ready to read and still warm. Books actually are hot off the press. Because the glue is hot, when you touch the spine of a very new book, it’s warm!

That glue is also rather wonderful - it arrives in pellets like little white seeds, then is heated until it melts, and is used as hot liquid glue.

cold dry glue, before it's melted

And that is how you make a book!

I must thank the lovely Floris team for arranging our trip, and all the staff of Bell and Bain for letting half a dozen publishers and one nosy writer get in their way all afternoon. I must also thank every child who has asked me how books are made, because their curiosity prompted me to find out more about printing.

I should stress that the above is just my tourist’s understanding of the printing process. I’ve probably missed a couple of steps and misunderstood most of the rest. (I certainly wouldn’t advise setting up a printing company using my description of the process as a guide.) But I hope my account of a trip to a printing press will give you some idea of the skill, effort and technology which goes into creating a physical book.

And next time a child asks me ‘how do you make a book?’ they’d better be ready for a very long and detailed answer. Or perhaps I’ll just give them a link to this blog…
 

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

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