Collage is a medium of edges. Every piece in Cut, Torn & Mended has been sliced out of somewhere else and set down somewhere new, and the pleasure of the work lives in the seam: a Georgian gentleman leaning on a silver tulip across a sheet of lined paper, a plaid figure holding a plate of cake, a knitted torso built from red brick. The zine reached our quote form on a Sunday afternoon from Lauren McLaughlin, Founding Director of Spilt Milk Gallery CIC, and the job was to print those edges so cleanly that the paper never got in the way.
Lauren chose her spec on the form, and it was a confident one; when she placed the order she repeated it line for line. A 300gsm gloss cover with gloss lamination is the shiniest thing we make: the navy, blush and bubblegum-pink cover artwork sits under a mirror-bright finish that throws the studio lights straight back at you, and the lamination keeps that sheen from scuffing in a tote bag or on a gallery counter. Inside, the 42 pages run on 150gsm silk, a smooth coated sheet that reproduces photographic fragments crisply without the glare gloss would bring to a spread. That pairing matters for collage. The fine cut lines, the mismatched grain of magazine scraps and the tiny printed text inside a torn photograph all stay sharp, while the white space around each piece reads as clean paper rather than a faint grey tint.
An A5 perfect-bound zine of 40 to 100 pages is one of the formats we print most, and this one sits right at the lower edge of what perfect binding can do. Perfect binding needs a minimum of 32 inside pages to form a 3mm spine, which is exactly what we produced here: enough to give the zine a proper square back, not enough for spine text, which wants roughly 5mm to be legible. A stapled zine has to run in multiples of four, because every sheet folds to make four pages. Perfect binding glues single leaves, so any even number works, which is how a 46-page zine became a four-page cover plus a 42-page text block without a single blank page to pad it out.
We are honest about the trade-off: the 300gsm gloss cover is slightly heavier to open and press flat than the thinner perfect-bound zines on our shelf, because a heavier cover springs. The upside is durability and that unmistakable glossy heft in the hand; if you would rather your zine fell open and stayed open, a lighter cover will do it.
Lauren's form asked for the project to go ahead within a week and, under the question about her most important cost factor, she wrote that she knew we would "do a great job at a fair price". Harriet's quote went back on the Tuesday after the bank holiday. On Monday 22 May the artwork arrived by WeTransfer with an order for 75 copies; the invoice was paid that afternoon and the PDF proof went out the same day. The zines left us on Friday 26 May. The following Monday was another bank holiday, so when Lauren emailed that evening to ask after them, Mike checked the tracking: at her local depot, out for delivery in the morning.
They reached her Edinburgh studio on Tuesday 30 May, and three days later she wrote: "They arrived and I'm really pleased with how they turned out - thanks!"
Collage zines reward a coated inside stock, because the whole point is reproducing other printed matter faithfully: newsprint halftones, glossy magazine skin tones, the yellowed cast of old book pages. Silk gives you that accuracy without gloss glare on a spread. If you want the shine on the cover but a softer, more tactile feel inside, uncoated pages are the other route, and we print both every week. Have a look at the A5 zine we printed for Disordered Readers Anonymous if you are weighing up the two.
If you have a collage, a sketchbook or a photocopier's worth of ideas ready to become a zine, get an instant price for zine printing at exwhyzed.com, or drop Harriet and Mike a line and we will talk paper.
