Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A Book for a Friend

A have a friend who has been writing poetry for a while as part of her healing process.  She confided that one of her greatest wishes is to publish her work.  I couldn't make that wish come true, but I could bind her existing collection of poetry into a book for her.

This was my first experience with actually printing and binding text.  I experimented both with Microsoft Word 2010 and Publisher 2010.  I was able to get Word to generate a Table of Contents and update it easily.  I didn't however like the print preview portion of the program because I couldn't see how the pages were going to line up for double sided printing.

I was using a booklet format 5.5 x 8.5" and I wanted to make sure the imposition of the numbers was correct.  I do have a more professional program Page Plus4 that I have purchased for this purpose, but I wanted to see what the Microsoft programs had to offer.  I found that Publisher did a good job of the printing when I imported the Word document into it but I couldn't find enough information in the help section to be able to update the Table of Contents in Publisher.  I guess I'll have to search Amazon and see what they have to offer in the way of resources.  Publisher lets you insert a Table of Contents so it must be able to create and update one.

Anyway, here is a look at the finished product.


I used a faux leather (heavily embossed) for the spine and a bronze, brown, gold and white paisley paper for the cover.  I used a coordinating striped paper for the endpapers.


It is a slim volume so I made it with just one signature and used a five hole pamphlet stitch to sew it. 


I kept the page numbers to the bottom center of each page.   I used the Calabri font and kept the body of the poetry at 10pt. which was quite readable in this size book.  The poems were arranged in chronological order.

I made note of things that I might do differently and I am going to try the same project using Page Plus4 to see if it makes some of the procedures easier.

My friend was quite pleased -- even if she wasn't "published" she did have her work in a hard cover book.

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