Simon Robinson has been photographing people photographing themselves since at least 2016: at Edinburgh Castle, on Westminster Bridge, in front of a choir in Liverpool, beside a lighthouse on the Wairarapa coast of New Zealand. People Taking Selfies collects the best of it under a flat orange cover, and it arrived at Ex Why Zed as one of three "People" books that Simon's imprint, Fistful of Books, wanted printed together and delivered inside a week. We printed all three as 230×210mm perfect-bound photobooks, 40 pages on 170gsm silk inside a matt-laminated 350gsm silk cover.
The format is 230mm wide by 210mm high, "slightly off square", and it matters. A true square fights a landscape photograph; a full landscape page wastes paper on a portrait one. Twenty millimetres of extra width lets each of Simon's frames sit inside a white border with room for a small caption underneath, place and year and nothing else. Before we settled on it we also priced a slim 230×120mm version, a format that turns a photobook into something closer to a flick-book, but the wider page won. Forty inside pages on 170gsm silk make a 3mm spine, which is the minimum a perfect-bound book needs to look like a book rather than a brochure, and it is exactly where this one lands.
Uncoated paper is the fashionable choice for a photobook, and for a quieter, more nostalgic edit it is often the right one. Simon asked for silk throughout, and he was right. These are bright, busy, documentary frames: a red-jacketed choir, a yellow puffer jacket against black bronze horses, a wall of protest placards. Silk keeps the detail crisp and the colour clean without the glare of gloss, and 170gsm gives each page enough body that the image on the reverse never ghosts through. The 350gsm cover takes the flat orange beautifully. Matt lamination stops that orange scuffing in a bag and gives the cover a soft, chalky hand that suits the joke: a big, serious-looking book about a very silly modern ritual, the one Mike summed up as "I have to go there so I can get a photo of me there to remember having been there".
Printing three versions of the same specification at the same time is one of the best economies in short-run publishing. The paper, the cover stock, the lamination and the binding are identical; only the artwork changes, so the setting-up is shared and each title usually costs less than it would on its own. For a photographer with a series in mind, or a publisher launching a set, it is always worth asking us to quote the group rather than the single book. Simon knew this, "I know you guys will do a great job at a fair price".
The enquiry came in on a Thursday evening marked "within a week". We quoted and had the job on order by Friday afternoon, sent three sets of PDF proofs on the Monday morning and had Simon's reply by mid-afternoon: "They look great! Will you still be able to deliver for Friday 18/10?" We could. The books were printed, bound and despatched on the Thursday for Friday delivery to Fistful of Books in Bristol, care of the Martin Parr Foundation. A week from first email to three finished photobooks is not something we promise on every job, but with print-ready files and a same-day approval it is entirely achievable, and this one proves it.
Perfect-bound photobooks from 40 to 100 pages are one of the formats we print most. For another street photography book we have printed, see Mike Chudley's street photography book, and our photobook printing page has live prices for every size, including the off-square ones. Get an instant price at exwhyzed.com, or tell Harriet and Mike about the series you have in mind.
