Some children's books are read. This one is filled in. My Friends, from Albert and Fred Books, is a 210×210mm hardback friendship keepsake book that hands a child the pen: name, nickname, star sign, a box to stick a photo in, a page headed "I like you because", and dotted lines waiting for a best friend's handwriting. Pebble and designer Claire brought us two editions, dinosaur and unicorn, and a clear idea that the book should feel like a proper hardback and behave like a journal. That brief shaped every material decision.
The inside pages are 70pp of 120gsm uncoated, printed in full colour throughout, and uncoated is the right call for a book that is going to be written in. Ask a seven-year-old to write on a silk sheet with a felt-tip and the ink sits on top, smears and takes an age to dry. Uncoated paper is soft and matt, the colour settles into the fibres, and a pencil, biro or felt-tip bites straight in. The finished copy feels crisp and easy to write on, which is the whole point of a keepsake journal, and the watercolour dinosaurs lose nothing on the matt surface.
The cover is a different job. It is printed on 170gsm silk, laminated and wrapped over a greyboard case, so the dinosaur landscape has a smooth, wipe-clean skin and corners that will survive a school bag. Seventy inside pages plus the endpapers give a 10mm spine, wide enough for the title to sit legibly on a shelf; hardbacks need 28 inside pages or more before the spine is deep enough to print on, so this one has room to spare.
Open the front board and you are not looking at plain white paper. The endpapers, front and back, are printed in full colour on 170gsm uncoated: a hand-drawn loop-the-loop doodle pattern with a taped-down label reading "This friendship book belongs to". It is the first thing a child sees and writes on, and the detail that separates a hardback that feels published from one that feels assembled. Printed endpapers joined the specification part-way through quoting, when the plan for unprinted ends gave way to Claire's designed version: a small line on the spec that does most of the work of making the book feel like a gift.
The dinosaur and unicorn versions share the same page structure, trim size, paper and binding, so we ran them as a single job of 100 copies, 50 of each: one make-ready, one binding set-up, two covers. The back covers carry Albert and Fred's line, "There are big ships and small ships, but the best ships of all are friendships", above a barcode and ISBN, because these are books for shops as well as for friends. Claire designs in Affinity rather than InDesign, so Harriet wrote the file sizes out long-hand: cover spreads at 250×474mm including the 10mm spine and 17mm wrap-arounds, endpapers as 210×420mm spreads, inside pages as single 210×210mm pages, all with 3mm bleed.
Before committing to the run, Pebble and Claire asked for one finished copy to hold. We printed and bound a single hardback, delivered it to Cheshire, and only then went ahead with the full print run on approval. A one-off hardback costs more per copy than the run, but far less than a hundred books carrying a decision you regret. The proof round earned its keep too: Claire spotted that the dinosaur cover proof still showed an earlier ISBN and the unicorn insides were a superseded version; corrected files went in, a new proof went back and was approved the following afternoon.
Fifteen months on, the pair were back, "almost ready to order another round of unicorn friendship books and some of our new mermaid books". The 210×210mm hardback is one of the formats we print most for children's books, and if you are planning a keepsake, journal or activity title of your own, our children's book printing and hardback book printing pages walk through the options. For a case-bound picture book with a very different palette, see how we brought Nippy the Baby Crocodile to life.
Get a price on our Printed Project Builder or send Harriet and Mike your page count and we will talk you through paper, spine and endpapers before you commit to a thing.
