A red Ferrari F40 sits on a block paved drive with rain beaded across its windscreen. Elsewhere, a Porsche in green, white and red race livery tears past a blur of Oulton Park trees, and a heap of salt and pepper chips on crumpled paper opens a story about the founding of a major automotive business. For The Love of Cars is Ben Midlane’s final major project, a car photography book he wrote and shot himself, then laid out like a monthly motoring magazine. We printed it at 265 x 210mm portrait: 164 pages of 130gsm gloss, perfect bound into a 300gsm gloss cover finished with matt lamination.
What happens to the spine when 64 pages become 164?
Ben’s first website enquiry was for a 64 page book. Harriet priced it on 130gsm gloss with a 4mm spine, and praised him for breaking convention with a custom size. He thanked her (“Thanks for this, it is really informative!”) and went quiet to finish the work.
A fortnight later he was back with a much bigger book, 162 pages and then 164. Mike requoted it with an 8mm spine, and within the hour Ben had spotted the knock on effect himself: “Just need to adjust my cover to meet the 8mm spine”.
That is the lesson worth stealing. A perfect bound cover wraps round the page block, so its artwork has to be drawn to the exact width of the spine, and that width comes from page count and paper weight together. On 130gsm gloss, 64 pages measured 4mm and 162 pages measured 8mm. Ben’s final two pages were a single extra leaf, and the spine held at 8mm. If your own extent is still moving, our artwork guide for glued paperbacks shows how to draw a cover round any spine.
Is gloss the right paper for car photography?
Cars are mostly reflections: chrome, polished alloy, wet paint. Gloss paper keeps those highlights bright because the ink stays up on a hard, shiny coating rather than soaking down into the fibres. On Ben’s cover a split rim wheel glints against a red arch speckled with water, and inside, the F40 stays a deep, saturated red. Uncoated stock would have softened all of that into something more nostalgic, and silk would sit halfway between.
A heavier 170gsm sheet would have made a thicker, stiffer, heftier book. At 130gsm the pages turn loosely, like a newsstand title, and 164 of them still close to an 8mm spine. Between the two quotes the cover lamination changed from gloss to matt, which leaves a calm, chalky outer and saves all the shine for the photographs. Both stocks are FSC certified. Stapling stops at 72 pages, so a 164 page softback had to be perfect bound: glued, square backed and sturdy enough for assessors to leaf through.
How do you make a final major project read like a magazine?
Ben borrowed a motoring monthly’s grammar. A running foot, the title paired with the page number, anchors each page. Each feature opens on a big serif headline with an italic standfirst and a words and images credit: Trackside Tales, about rediscovering Oulton Park at a Porsche RS track day, The Life of a Car Spotter and A Taste of Innovation. A Fiat Panda 100HP badge fills one page edge to edge, opposite a small framed shot of a driver behind the wheel.
Trackside Tales also shows how to handle a photograph spread over two pages. Perfect binding glues every page into the spine, which swallows a few millimetres of each spread. Ben parked the Porsche well onto the right hand page and let only blurred trees and tarmac run through the middle. The custom page helps too. At 265 x 210mm it matches A4 for width but stands 32mm shorter, so it has a magazine’s presence without the feel of a coursework folder.
How quickly can a final year book be printed?
Ben’s files landed by WeTransfer on a Wednesday morning, right on the schedule he had set a week earlier. Mike sent the invoice within half an hour, with a verdict of his own: “Ben, you’ve done a great job with this. If this is a Uni project, it’s a 1st all day long”. Ben confirmed it was his final year, “so fingers crossed! Hoping the F40 inside wins them over”, and the online proof followed a few hours later.
By the following Tuesday every page was printed and trimmed, waiting only for binding. We planned to ship the next day for a Friday delivery, emailed a one hour DPD slot that morning, and the books arrived nine days after the artwork. Ben was away that weekend, so a friend signed for the box.
Photographing cars for your own book? The Drive My Car hardback photo book takes the same obsession into a casebound format, and our final major project printing page has student specs and prices. Tell us your page count before you finish the cover, and we will send back the spine width to design to.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
