A woman stands in a packed public meeting, arm flung upwards, mouth open mid shout. She is the cover star of Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s, the booklet that accompanies the SE1 Stories exhibition about residents on the South Bank who pushed back against developers for homes and open space. Inside are tenement demolitions, a "Flats not rats" placard outside Southwark town hall and a street map of the neighbourhood. We printed this local history booklet at A5 with 20 pages: a matt laminated 200gsm silk cover, 16 pages of 150gsm silk inside, black ink throughout and a pair of wire stitches in the spine fold.
A Tuesday handover and a Wednesday deadline
The first enquiry came from Paul, the photographer whose picture is on the cover. Then Anthony took over the commission one Tuesday morning with one change to the spec: a matt laminated finish for the cover. The revised quote reached him within two hours. By that evening he had approved it and named the deadline, Wednesday of the following week, with delivery to Blackfriars Settlement, the local charity that turns up in the booklet's own pages.
His artwork was print ready, so by lunchtime the next day Mike had checked the files and told him the artwork was fine. The PDF proof followed on Thursday morning. On Saturday the boxes were signed for at Blackfriars Settlement, four days before they were due. Anthony tracked them down on the deadline day and wrote back: "Thanks very much for such speedy delivery."
Why black ink on silk suits archive photographs
The photographs are all black and white, most of them taken during the campaigns and many first published in the area's community newspaper. Printing them with black ink alone keeps the greys neutral. No cyan or magenta creeps into the mix, so a grey sky never drifts green and a face never turns faintly purple. It also keeps the unit cost modest, which matters to a volunteer group selling copies.
An early quote offered a heavier 300gsm silk cover over 115gsm uncoated pages. SE1 Stories went with 150gsm silk inside and a 200gsm silk cover, and for this content silk was the better paper. Old press photographs live in their mid greys: a crowd of faces, wet brickwork, hand painted lettering on a placard. Silk holds the ink up on its surface, so those tones stay sharp, where uncoated stock soaks them in and the shadows close up. At 150gsm a photograph on one side never shadows the text behind it. Matt lamination takes the glare off the cover photo and copes with constant handling.
Wire stitching takes any page count between eight and seventy two that divides by four, and staples let each spread open flat, so the map of Waterloo, Blackfriars and Bankside reads clearly with every labelled site intact. Our wire stitching set up guide explains supplying the pages in reading order.
The local history booklet that kept running out
About eight weeks after that first delivery, Anthony wrote again: "They have been a great success so we need some more!" The artwork had not changed, so the reprint needed only a fresh proof. His order arrived on a Sunday night, the proof went out midweek, and the boxes left us on the Friday and reached him the next day. His verdict: "Brilliant turn around time."
The pattern held. When stock ran low again, the next reprint was proofed the day after the order and delivered straight to the exhibition at St John's Waterloo. Another was invoiced and proofed within forty minutes of the order on a Thursday afternoon, then left us the following Monday. One approved, print ready file is what makes this possible: each reprint is a proof check and a press slot, with nothing to rebuild. If you expect a run to sell out, keep that final PDF safe and send it back to us unchanged.
Four more pages for the second edition
For the second edition, SE1 Stories wanted the same specification with four more pages. A stapled booklet can only grow in fours, because every sheet is folded in half and nested inside the next, so one extra sheet adds four pages. Sixteen became twenty with the cover and binding untouched, and the new edition closes on an update headed Then and Now, with a protest banner reading "Love the Elephant, Hate Gentrification".
The finished artwork arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and Mike had the invoice back to him within the hour. The PDF proof landed the next morning, Anthony approved it just over an hour later, and the second edition was on the courier's van by the following Monday morning.
For another community history in print, see Made in Our One Square Mile, a Colchester local history booklet we printed for a heritage project, and our guide to printing a booklet walks through sizes, stocks and binding. When your group has the photographs gathered and the story written, try our instant quote calculator and we will look after the first run and every reprint that follows.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
