How art books are made
by Diana Bychkova
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I thought I would put a few thoughts together, as I was asked several times by those who work directly with rare collections, librarians, professors of the history of book, and those who are outsiders to the field, about the technical processes of making art books, how long it may take to print and bind such a book, why the plates are destroyed afterwards, what it entails in terms of costs, and so forth. All this comes from the professional field work and often remains beyond the theories taught in class. Sometimes it is assumed that the cost of a single book would cover the publication costs of a whole edition, and that the prices of artworks on the market are always exaggerated… I do agree, in part, with the last statement, and encourage people to distinguish between two kinds of values when approaching either an item called a (modern) artist's book or a rare book: 1) market value, which depends on the level of an artist’s promotion but may result in poor taste and childish execution, and 2) aesthetical value which is determined by artistic imagery, depth of creative thought, professional quality of prints and so forth.
But that has nothing to do with the pure artisan processes involved in the publication. So, I thought I would uncover the behind-the-scene steps related to the production techniques of art editions presented on our website, such as the fairy tale Silence, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the collected poems Satires, another fairy tale with miniatures, etc.
1. Layout.
1. Layout.
For the common editions printed in thousands of copies, the layout is normally done with graphic design software, and it takes a couple of hours, sometimes a little longer, depending on the amount of pictures etc. But this doesn’t make much sense in case of art editions, in which every single detail is curated with particular attention. Layout design for limited art editions is, first of all, about creating a rhythmicity of all the elements of the book, also called the elements of the paratext: small and large pictures, blocks of text, white space around them, page headers and page numbers, other graphic elements, capitals, title page, ending, second cover, and cover. The layout, then, is designed in a way that it resonates with the main concepts of the literary work included in that book. In other words, creating a page-by-page layout is also part of the intermedial translation of the book. I normally create the so-called formal composition of the book, a maquette of the project, which consists of the exact format and number of pages of the future book, and placement of all the elements on them. The typographic standards are also considered, as well as the format of paper, such as in-folio, in-quarto, in-octavo, etc.
This may take a few days of work, depending on the length and complexity of the text.
2. Textual part.
2. Textual part.
It can be printed with movable typesetting, it can be mechanically or digitally reproduced, it can be handwritten. The choice is based on the artistic concept and entire design of a given book. Once it is decided to write the entire book by hand, it may take 3-5 days of work to develop the shape of each single letter and the conjunctions between them in a way that the alphabet has some conformity, and the text can then be written with that font. Then, I sit and write by hand the entire book, day-by-day. 154 Shakespeare’s sonnets: 2 hours each, including some wasted papers and drafts, and two months of full-time work in total, if you allow yourself weekends. Then the development of the title page comes, that should look like a sign, like a product of design, and that involves the creation of 5-7 variants, and the re-writing of the final version. I followed the same approach for the book Silence: first, developed the shape of the alphabet, linking the elements of Old Slavic fonts and modern calligraphy, and then wrote the entire tale by hand, fitting the text into pre-designed page layout.
When all the pages are written, they are going to be digitized in order to be reproduced, either with photo method or digitally, onto the pages of the entire edition.
3. Etchings.
3. Etchings.
The technique of etching is the most complex of all the techniques of traditional printmaking, but it allows an infinite amount of artistic possibilities, with the finest detail impossible in other methods, and therefore it is most interesting. For example, it took me three full days to engrave this drawing on a metallic plate of a small format. Once the picture is engraved, then, the process of etching metal implies several layers of work that are required to reach different depths of signs. Such nature of signs depends on the behaviour and percentage of acid and on the etching times of layers. Every time a plate is in acid, I intuitively count how many seconds or minutes amount to one or another sign depth. For instance, one copper plate may be immersed in acid 30 or 40 times. Some parts of the plate are covered with varnish after each immersion to stop the corrosion of metal in those parts, thereby allowing to etch in the parts that have remained uncovered. This particular plate has 23 layers of etching and 23 immersions in acid. Such a diversity of sign depths results in different gradations, shadows and lights in the printed product.When the plate is finished, I print a few test-images to see where I want to add some more gradations of gray, and I continue to work on the same plate with the technique of aquatint, with several etched layers as well. Altogether, the work on a single plate (17x20 cm) amounts to several days. And the book contains 19 etchings: the investment of time that will be paid after the entire edition is sold out, which may take years. If one needs to make a living with other jobs and continues to engrave etchings in the evenings, then working on such an edition takes a year or two to reach completion.
Books with original prints are also of a great value because after a limited edition has been published (normally from 25 to 100 copies, and up to 300 copies in larger editions), the plates-clichés are destroyed in order to guarantee the value of each copy and to ensure that only a certain number of original copies of the work exist in the world. This is stated in the colophon, and each printed copy is signed by the authors and numbered as 1/25, 2/25, etc. (otherwise, lack of that information implies that a second edition can be printed in the future). Therefore, the lesser number of copies is printed, the higher value each copy has, because the total cost of materials and time invested in the entire project (to engrave the plates, to arrange the textual space, typography, or to write calligraphy, etc.) is going to be divided by the number of copies. Sometimes, a book can be printed mechanically but contains glued original prints and therefore also has a certain value, compared to the same pictures if they were reproduced mechanically or digitally.
4. Printing.
4. Printing.
Products of the original graphic arts (etching, linocut, xylography, etc.) are printed in a limited number of copies, and each copy is considered to be an original, as each picture is printed individually rather than copied, and under the artist's supervision or by the artist himself.
First, each original picture is printed with an individual approach, which requires craft skills and implies a complex process of rubbing ink on a plate before each single exemplar can be printed. In other words, what results in printing depends on one’s hand and on how the plate is cleaned. This means that, even if printed in series, all the exemplars of the same picture differ in small details, such as the contrast of signs, intensity or clarity of the background, slight gradations of relief on paper, and so forth — those elements that amount to unique artistic beauty. Second, an etched metallic cliché is gradually crushed when under heavy pressure between two rollers, and, depending on the type of etching, a plate allows for printing of 25 to 200/300 copies. After this, the plate becomes unusable, i.e. prints cannot be repeated. In fact, etching is considered to be the only technique of visual art that cannot be falsified because every etched plate is unique (as explained above, the etched signs vary depending on seconds).
Etching (or, broadly speaking, the family of intaglio printing) features in rubbing ink inside the etched lines while wiping the surface of a plate; i.e. we see on the printed picture these deeply incised lines that show in black. But the textual part is made with the relief printing technique which implies the contrary process, like in xylography, when the printed parts are on the surface. This requires two entirely independent printings to impress the text and picture on a single sheet, which also carries the added difficulty of inserting the picture in the proper position with respect to the text, apart from a relatively long and scrupulous printing process of each single copy of the picture. When paper is prepared (is torn by hand for each page, as it looks awful when art paper is cut with scissors, and it is wet sheet-by-sheet, as to absorb well the ink), when the test-prints are made and approved, then I start printing the etchings themselves. The process is speeded up a bit because I work in series: I print one page for the entire edition, then another page for all the copies of the edition, etc. But in any case, it is not a digital print; each printed etching involves several-step process, as above, which is multiplied by 19 etchings in the book. The printed pages are going to be dried under the weight. Then the textual parts are printed, and then these sheets are folded and prepared to be bound. Therefore, it may take 15-20 hours of work on a single copy of the book from taking papers in hand, and ready-to-print etchings, to having a printed volume ready to be bound.
The quality of printing is identified by a number of technical features, such as well-cline edges of the printed etchings, the relief that is seen on the other side of pictures, the deep black ink used for the fonts, and so forth.
5. Binding.
5. Binding.
Bookbinding, for me, always bridges craft skills and creativity. Take off the creative side of work, and you will have replicas that imitate existing books; take off the craft part, and the book will have an amatory quality of execution. When it comes to binding a book, I always tend to interpret the content of a given book through design that I develop for the cover. The volume with Shakespeare’s sonnets has some romantic flames with etchings; the philosophy of the fairy tale Silence is reflected in the moon and the combination of letters; the satires of everyday life from the collected poems are represented with the collage of my drawings and the fonts taken from early 20-th century newspapers. When working on the bookcase for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that was commissioned by the Rare Collections department at Weldon library (Western University, London, Canada) I focused on the poem “To Think of Time”. However, the cover does not illustrate this particular poem or any other from the collection, but rather reflects the mood, the emotional waves and the rhythmical quality of words and lines, and so, it is designed with many-color leather incrustations, with flying leaves and some relief prints. (I will describe the work on the Whitman’s case separately).
There are different binding techniques and prints on leather but, on average, the processes are similar for each of them, and consist of the following steps: to prepare the block of paper intended to be bound, to make holes for cords, to fix the cords properly on the stand, to flash all the pages together, to cut cardboards for the cover and work out the edges, to fix the paper block to the covers with those cords that were bound at the beginning, to create and fix end bands, to work out the leather making it thin (and that is a very time-consuming process that can take several hours), to lay the skin around the book spine and on the cover and to continue to work over until the leather repeats all the curves and attaches well (another time-consuming process). Then, in the case of Shakespeare’s volume, for instance, the calligraphy on the binding is cut by hand with a knife (a couple of hours of time), the metallic parts are also cut individually for each copy of the book, polished, and engraved (one full day of work, if done in series for multiple copies). In many cases, I make a relief print on leather, and in order to do that, I create a cliché from metal or plastic that consists of engraving necessary patterns, which then will be imprinted under press, using a cold or hot method. Sometimes, single elements on the binding can be golden colored.
An illustrator is someone who makes pictures – at least so the majority would think. Still, what does to make pictures for books imply? I discussed in length the principles of intermediality and word-image translation in my PhD thesis, and it took 300 pages. How long does one live with the creative ideas before they are formed into concrete images, how long does it take to think of the main characters of the story, to awake in the middle of the night to conceptualise the symbolism of visual metaphors that one had in mind for weeks or months, to sketch those ideas on paper, to develop finest details of each illustration, to make them resonate together with the text, and so forth? I do not even include this work in the cost of my editions, because it cannot be measured in hours. What is described above is the pure artisan work that comes after the entire series of illustrations has been developed in detail, and is ready to be transferred to the metallic plates, and the book project has been designed in every part. What I did not mention, and what is included in the prices of art editions, is quite expensive materials: brass or cooper plates for etchings and metallic parts on the bindings, Hahnemugle paper for art prints, natural leather for bindings, art papers, and so forth.
How much does it cost?
How much does it cost?
I often get such questions as how much would it cost to bind our book, to print an edition for us, to develop a plan for an exhibit, to make catalogues, etc., etc. The answer is: “It always depends…”. A price list for such works does not exist. Do you want your book to be bound in leather or papers? The cost of materials varies, and the work processes are totally different. Would you like to have a relief print on leather? How complex? A simple pattern of a few lines, or should I carve a cliché that would cover the entire surface of the book with finest details? Do you need a hand-made or machine-made end bands? An exhibit that you would like me to plan… what is the amount of the items to be displayed? What kind of items are they? Will you provide me with the history of that collection and all the necessary resources, or should I do the research work? Would you like me to work on the entire project, from management of human and financial resources to the planning, the installation work, and to the production of the catalogues of that exhibit, or will that be a partial work? How complex would be each step of the project? An edition that you would like me to print… Will I develop the entire book project, from the layout, to the illustrations, etchings, binding, and then will complete the publication process? There can be an infinite variety of options on each stage of such projects, which will amount to the final price. The same for the restoration works, how complex each step will be, and so forth.
How long does it take to print or bind an art book?
How long does it take to print or bind an art book?
The answer is: “it does not matter”. The reason for this is that I am charging not only for the hours but also for my skills and for the years of my experience and the exceptional standard of my work. The book bindings that I made 10 or 15 years ago have a lot of imperfections; I reached a better level in my crafts by repeating dozens of times the same processes, by polishing the engraving method of clichés and making the relief prints on leather, by writing calligraphy in all the historical styles, by perfecting the nuances of printing, when I printed by hand 300-copy editions of etchings also for other artists, and there is always room for improvement. In the end, craft skills get better and better with repeating the same processes over and over for many years. Not to be bored, I tend to add the most of my creative capacity to each artisan work that I approach. I believe this makes my editions unique.
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