Just a glorious self-published book for the never-endingly brilliant Modern Toss. This time a square perfect bound book is the vehicle for restoring Alan from his decade-long hiatus. Where has he been? What, you have not heard of Alan? What on earth is the matter with you. Treat your eyes to some reading material of a witty and rib-tickling nature.
Alan: Collected Works gathers up the strip that Modern Toss readers have been asking after for years. The humour is blunt, fast and very funny, and the drawing is deliberately rough: heavy brush marks, scratchy pencil, hand-lettered sound effects and speech bubbles dropped in wherever they land. It is the sort of book you open to look at one page and put down twenty minutes later.
The audience already exists and already knows the tone, which is a lovely position to print from. No explaining required, no softening. If you are self-publishing your own strip or collection, our comic and graphic novel printing service covers formats like this one, and our self published book printing pages are a good place to start on quantities and budget.
The red jumps off the cover and grabs you. It is doing a lot of work for a single flat colour: a solid, slightly warm red carrying one word of heavy serif type and a tiny scribbled character down in the corner. Nothing else. On a shop table it reads from across the room.
Matt lamination over an uncoated cover is the combination we would push for here, and it is one people often overlook. Uncoated stock on its own would have made that big red field vulnerable — solid colour shows every scuff and fingerprint, and a book like this gets handled constantly. The matt laminate protects it while keeping the surface soft and low-sheen, so it still feels like paper rather than plastic. Order some free printed paper samples if you want to feel the difference between matt and gloss on an uncoated sheet.
Inside, the uncoated pages full of black and white drawings keep you hooked. This is the right call for line work: uncoated holds ink without the glare that would fight all that scratchy detail, and it takes a pencil texture honestly instead of making it look like a scan. Black only throughout also keeps the cost sensible on a longer run, which matters enormously when you are funding the print yourself.
The square format is quietly clever. Most of these cartoons are single square panels, so a 210x210mm page gives each one a frame that matches its own proportions with room to breathe around the edge. Nothing has to be cropped or shrunk to fit a portrait page, and when two panels sit facing each other across the spread they read as a pair rather than a sequence.
Then there is the pacing. Chapter dividers arrive as solid mid-grey panels with the title reversed out in white serif type, which does two jobs at once: it breaks the run of white pages, and it gives your eye somewhere to rest before the next barrage. Printing large flat greys in black ink only on uncoated stock is a real test, and they have come out even and smooth with no banding.
The tonal range across the book is wider than you would expect from a black-only job. Some spreads are near-white with a few brush strokes. Others are washed in mid-grey with fine pen line over the top. A few go almost solid black. All of it holds together because there is only one ink doing the work.
One last thing, and we cannot be the only ones: 'Alan' is a funny word. The longer you look at it sitting on its own in the middle of that red cover, the more it looks like it is spelt wrong.
Our favourite part of this job. Partway through, Jon asked whether some of the books could be supplied with the title left off the front, so he could hand-stamp 'Alan' onto them himself and release those as a separate early edition. He assumed it would be difficult.
It is not difficult at all, and we did it for the same price. Every copy shares identical inside pages, so the only change is running two versions of the cover through the press instead of one. If you are planning a signed, numbered or hand-finished edition alongside a standard one, ask us early — it is often far cheaper than people expect, and it turns one print run into two distinct products.
This one took a scenic route, and we enjoyed every mile of it. Jon first came to us wanting a square hardback: casebound, matt laminated, unprinted endpapers. Then came the good question — was there a cover finish that would make it feel special?
His instinct was linen cloth with the title hand-stamped on top, which is exactly the kind of idea we like to be asked about. We walked him through the Winter & Co cover materials we bind with, from mock-cloth Wibalin through to woven Brillianta, and explained the catch: none of them can be printed onto, so any title has to be foiled or applied afterwards. We also flagged that foil sits cleanest on the smoother, untextured stocks, and that a coarse weave can leave small imperfections in the foil that no amount of care will fully prevent. Better to know that before ordering than after.
We were equally straight about the money. Cloth carries a minimum material charge whatever the quantity, and foiling adds a further cost on top. None of it was hidden in a footnote.
From there the spec moved around a good deal, and that is completely normal on a self-published book. The extent grew from 70pp to 120pp and finally settled at 96pp. The format went square, then landscape, then square again. We priced hardback against softcover so the difference was visible rather than theoretical. And when Jon asked whether 'A5 square' was a thing, the answer turned out to be yes — A5 squared is 210x210mm, the size he had already been quoted for weeks earlier. We quoted 148mm square and standard A5 alongside it anyway, so the decision was made on real numbers.
Artwork arrived by WeTransfer, followed by an invoice and a PDF proof for sign-off. There was one final check we rather liked: Jon wanted to know whether barcodes scan reliably on a red background. We looked at the contrast, agreed it had plenty, and went to press. The books were delivered on the dates he had asked for. Our perfect binding set-up guide covers the file side of all this if you are preparing your own.
Mostly by being easy to think out loud with. Jon changed the size, the extent and the binding more than once, asked about materials he had not used before, and floated a two-version cover idea he expected to be told no about. Every one of those got a straight answer, a fresh quote and an honest note about what would and would not work in practice.
That is the actual job on a self-published book: not just putting ink on paper, but helping someone spend their own money well. Get a figure for your own project with our instant printing quote calculator, or browse the portfolio for formats worth borrowing.
