A woman in a pale blue gown lifts a ruffled, fringed hat across her face, framed by carved panelling and bare floorboards. That photograph fills the cover of Little Venice Rooms: The Renaissance of a London Abode, the interior design book in which Sera of London opens up her own apartment, one room at a time. It is a well known location for magazine shoots, and Sera keeps it moving: "I just change it around a lot." Inside, palms crowd an indoor garden, a roll top bath faces an ornate mirror and a candlelit salon fills with peacock chairs. In print it became an A4 portrait hardback with 232 inside pages of 150gsm silk, printed lace endpapers and a 21mm spine.
A hardback built to sit beside her first book
Sera already had a published title, Seductive Interiors, and this one had to hold its own beside it in shops and on Amazon. Her brief for the finish was short and clear: "glossy, thick pages, and top notch". From our first call Mike was planning an impressive hardback, and A4 portrait gives a room photograph the scale of a magazine page. Open the book and a picture can run across a 420mm spread, which is exactly how the candlelit salon is laid out. Case binding was the obvious build: rigid boards keep a heavy, image packed book square and shrug off shop handling.
Gloss, 200gsm silk or 150gsm silk?
Before the run, Sera wanted one sample copy, because everything had to look "100000 percent". After a call, Mike switched that sample's cover to gloss lamination and its pages from 150gsm silk to 170gsm gloss. When it came to the main print run, our estimator went looking for the right sheet, and no gloss stock came in a size that would hold the A4 spread while printing with the grain. Paper fibres line up in one direction, and pages that run with the grain parallel to the spine turn easily and fold cleanly. So we quoted a heavier 200gsm silk instead, litho printed and section sewn, with Mike's reasoning that silk is the "same coated surface but less shine". The final run went ahead on 150gsm silk. Across 232 pages that builds a 21mm spine with real heft, and the smooth coated surface keeps sequins, palm fronds and candle flames sharp on the page.
A 10mm spine on a book that needed 19
The first cover file from Sera's designer, Matt, measured 474 x 337mm with a 10mm spine. Harriet's preflight caught it: a case bound A4 of that extent needed 483 x 337mm, including a 19mm spine, so we sent a template ready for the artwork to drop into. When the text later grew to 232 pages the spine grew to 21mm, and Mike rebuilt it from the cover artwork we already held. The hardback artwork set up guide shows how boards, spine and turn ins add up. When Sera came back for a second edition, she asked for the title on the spine, which at 21mm has plenty of width for type, and Mike suggested lifting her signature 3 to 5mm clear of the front cover's foot.
Lace backgrounds at low resolution: keep them or replace them?
Much of this book sits on lace. Chapter openers and caption panels are printed over peach and gold lace patterns, and at preflight those backgrounds flagged as low resolution, some between 150 and 250dpi. Mike gave Matt a fix worth remembering on any layout: place a picture smaller and its effective resolution climbs in proportion. A 100dpi picture placed at half the size prints at 200dpi; at a third of the size, 300dpi. Matt judged them against the printed test copy and kept them; on a faint pattern behind type, a little softness goes unnoticed. With bleed added along the foot of page one, the proof went out and Sera approved it within the half hour: "Sent all good Pls go to print".
"I will be in all day waiting with great excitement"
Sera, author of Little Venice Rooms
For another home brought to the page, see the coffee table book we printed for Paul Smith Home Decor, and compare the boards, papers and finishes we offer for hardback book printing. If your own rooms deserve a book, send us the page count first and we will size the spine before anyone designs the cover.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
