A desert highway runs off the bottom edge of the cover and keeps going until it dissolves into a line of pale mountains. Up in the washed out sky, three words stack in tall, narrow white capitals: DON’T STOP NOW. Fergus Coyle’s name sits small on the tarmac, like a mile marker.
Fergus is a Bristol photographer whose portfolio is thick with cycling: randonneurs, Paris Brest Paris, a TransAmerica tour. Don’t Stop Now is a stapled photo book of open roads, canyon rims, loaded touring bikes and the odd character met along the way. We printed it in October 2016 and photographed a copy again in 2025, and it still looks like something you would stuff in a pannier. Its spec is modest and its ideas travel well. These are the ones we would lift for any book about a long road.
One desert road, wrapped round front and back
Open the cover out flat and the picture never stops. The back carries the scrub and the cloud, the front carries the road and the title, and the scene runs unbroken across the spine fold. A wraparound turns the cover into a panorama, which suits a book about distance better than a framed image with a blank back ever could.
To try it on your own cover, choose a landscape frame wide enough to cover both panels and keep anything important away from the centre fold. Then extend the picture 3mm past every trimmed edge, as our explainer on carrying a photograph past the trim on every side shows.
An uncoated cover with no film on top
The book runs on uncoated stock throughout: a 300gsm cover and 120gsm pages. As the order was confirmed, Marton, who laid the book out, asked us to take the lamination off both covers, and we did. That decision is the first thing your fingers notice. The cover is dry and slightly toothy, with no sheen, and the faded desert colours sink into the fibres the way they would on an old postcard.
Lamination would have made the surface slicker and swallowed that texture. Leaving it off keeps the cover honest, with a little more care needed around the spine fold. If your photographs are soft and filmic, an unlaminated uncoated cover is worth asking for, and if you are unsure, compare both in the post before you commit.
Forty four pages, because staples work in fours
At quote stage the layout stood at 42 pages. Heather explained that a stapled book needs inside pages in multiples of four, so the choice was 40 or 44, or a glued spine instead. Marton went to 44. Every sheet in a stapled book folds into four pages, which is why the count matters, and our guide to how staples hold a short photo book together explains the maths.
The format helps too. At 255 x 210mm it is a portrait page that comes close to square, big enough for a canyon and slim enough to roll into a bag.
Photographs that meet across the gutter
The best moment in the book is a spread: a dry yellow plain under white cloud, blue mountains behind, and a red octagonal sign reading WHOA propped on a rough wooden stand in the middle of nowhere. It is funny, it is strange, and it stops you exactly as the title tells you not to stop.
Getting a picture across two pages of a stapled book took one file fix. Marton’s first attempts at the PDF either split spreads with a white line or dropped pages. Mike suggested File, then Export, instead of the print booklet route. On screen the new file still showed a hairline where the pages met, but every image ran beyond the crop marks, and Mike could confirm the two halves would meet at the staples with no white gap. If your layout software offers a booklet option, skip it and export single pages, in order, with bleed and crop marks.
White space as a rest stop
Many pictures sit as squares inside white borders, some facing a blank page. A man in a cowboy hat stands upright on the back of a chestnut horse, alone on the right hand page, with nothing at all opposite. Elsewhere a long haired cyclist straddles a bike buried under panniers on an empty road. Giving a portrait an empty facing page makes the reader pause, and turns a stranger into the main event.
A contact sheet of the whole ride
Near the end, both pages fill with a grid of 24 small snapshots each: bikes leaning on walls, a cow skull, a snake on hot tarmac, a road sign reading AUSTIN SUMMIT, the Golden Gate Bridge. After all that space, the density is a jolt, like emptying a pocket of receipts onto a table.
“I have just received the delivery the books look great!”
Marton, who laid out Don’t Stop Now
Got a ride, a route or a road trip waiting for its book? Find more starting points among our photo book ideas for long journeys and road trips, then cost a stapled photo book of your own.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100