"Our zine IN BLOOM looks very professional and bright, and we're proud of it." That was Hyla Etame's verdict a fortnight after the box landed in Canterbury, and it is a fair summary of what a well-chosen silk stock and a matt-laminated cover do for portrait photography. In Bloom began as an online photo series by a group of University of Kent students, portraits and interviews with friends on the cusp of whatever comes after university, and with a grant from Living Proof it became a printed object: an A5 perfect-bound zine, 40 pages on 130gsm silk inside a 300gsm silk cover, 100 copies, delivered five days after the order was placed.
Living Proof, the organisation that funded the project, had printed two zines with us already, so the students arrived with a recommendation and a set of choices to make. Over three months the specification moved through several quote forms: 72 pages, then 40; wire-stitched, then perfect bound; uncoated, then silk. Where it settled tells you something about the book. At 40 inside pages a perfect-bound spine is possible, only just, and it changes the object: the title sits on a 3mm square edge, the zine stands on a shelf, and the cover wraps the block like a paperback rather than folding around it like a pamphlet. For a project the students wanted to feel finished and hand to the people in it, that mattered. On the Sunday before the order went in we built an InDesign cover template with the single pages linked, because a 3mm spine needs the artwork set up as one spread at the exact spine width, and it is easier to show than to describe.
The photographs are the book: a woman in a green velvet top cradling a bunch of wild flowers, a portrait in a white tee against white, a page of sticker-covered collage, a friend in a mint jacket photographed on a stairwell. The inside pages settled on 130gsm silk. Silk is smooth and crisp, so the flat studio backgrounds stay clean and the skin tones stay warm, and the "bright" that Hyla noticed is the paper as much as the printing: silk bounces a little more light back than uncoated, which lifts saturated colour. The 300gsm silk cover is matt laminated, so the portrait on the front, with its pale blue script title, shrugs off fingerprints and scuffs where a bare silk cover would show every handling mark within a week.
We would rather say this now than have you discover it later. Perfect binding needs a minimum of 32 inside pages to give a spine worth gluing, and at 40 pages you are at the thin end of the range: the spine is 3mm, the block is light, and the glued edge has less surface to hold than it would on a 100-page book. In Bloom is a smart little book, but it should be handled like one. Run a thumb down the crease of a spread and the pages will press flat, with the cover's hinge helping that flexibility; force it open like a hardback and you are asking too much of the glue. If your zine is under 32 pages, or you want it to fold right back on itself, wire stitching is the honest alternative: it works from 8 to 72 pages in multiples of four and opens flat by design. Above that, or if you want the spine, go perfect bound and treat the crease kindly.
Hyla's final quote form said "I am going to print today", and we took it at its word. The order went live on a Monday, a revised cover came through on the Tuesday, and the courier delivered to Canterbury on the Saturday morning, with the end of term still ahead. Tight, but as always, we did it!
A5 perfect-bound photo zines at 40 to 100 pages are one of the formats we print most, and if you have a photo project waiting for a spine, our zine printing page has the options, and the Across the Pond 2 street photography zine shows another photographer's take on the same format.
Fill in our fast quote form, or drop Harriet and Mike a page count; we will tell you straight whether it wants staples or a spine.
