Context Book Manufacture

Having deigned my context book and chosen the stock of the french fold inside pages (bulky newsprint) I wanted to choose a stock  for the cover that would compliment the inner pages. 

The choice was between  a textures watercolour paper and a flat matte white. I decided to get both printed to see how the cover design would behave on each.

Watercolour:

 Flat Matte White:

After printing onto these I found that the textured stock was much better and complimented the slightly off white, textured newsprint of the inner pages. 
After much careful cropping - I was cropping to the bleed for the left and right hand edges to allow overlap in the gutter and to the crop marks at the top and bottom edges - very hard to cut to two sets of crop marks without errors when you've had next to no sleep I can tell you. Maximum concentration! The good news is that I did it (with only one page needing to be reprinted and cropped) so I folded all spreads in to french fold format and awaited it to be bound. 

Knowing that I couldn't simply glue the french fold pages I waited overnight until today when I could get a fashion student friend to run the pages through a sewing machine. Obviously the book wouldn't go through all at once so I broke it down into signatures with a view to gluing these together for added strength. 

The glueing process:

This took some time but its something you really don't want to rush. As you can see in the below pictures - the book is sewn 5mm from the spine edge, signatures clamped together and glued multiple times along the spine for structural integrity. 

All that is left to do is glue into place on on the cover spine and Bob's your uncle - one finished design context book! Final photos to come soon :)