I’ve been looking at all of the costs involved with producing an initial run for this book project. I met last week with a wonderful artist, Inge Bruggeman, who has been making and publishing fine press artist’s books since 1992. I wanted her to be the one to letterpress the text pages in my book. She has a beautiful studio and makes lovely artist books. I was inspired by her to move forward despite the growing costs and obstacles.
I have had to make some modifications to the original design to keep the costs down. Instead of the book size being 11″ x 12″, it will be closer to 9.5″ x 13″. This will be a more economical size to print and will require less time for paper cutting. I also may cut back on the number of pages of text, but I don’t need to decide that right now, so I’m putting that decision off.
So far, I plan to print an edition of 100 of just the book and and an edition of 30 books in slipcases with two loose prints, one from each part of the project. The costs, up to this point to print an initial run of 10 plain books and 10 books in the slipcases are:
$785 Paper for Books
$2,328 Letterpressing (this would be for the entire project, so this would be a one time cost that would not reappear in future printings)
$90 Prescoring of Pages
$2,240 Bookbinding, Slipcase Production10 Slipcases
$5,443 Total Initial Output
Because the costs are higher than I anticipated, I’m trying to apply for a grant that would at a minimum cover $1,000 of these initial costs. I’m sure the competition (especially right now) will be tough, and it will take some time to answer all of the proposal questions, but it’s worth a shot…
I’ll keep you posted…
