Kimberley Quirke's quote form arrived with one line that told us what mattered: "I would like printed inside cover/end papers. They will hold miniature multiple illustrated characters. Is this possible rather than blank inside covers?" At Ex Why Zed, printed endpapers create a wow factor when the book's cover is opened. The Big Skate on the Ice Puddle is a title in her Wildflower Hollow Series, written and illustrated in coloured pencil, and we printed a 216×216mm square hardback with a matt-laminated case, 48 pages on 170gsm silk and endpapers that steal the show.
Open the front board and the endpapers are a meadow: dozens of tiny wildflowers, berries, seed heads and beetles, each one a character from the story, scattered across the sheet like pressed specimens. They are printed in full colour on 170gsm uncoated, front and back, and because uncoated paper is soft and matt the pencil work sits in the surface rather than on it. Endpapers are the one part of a hardback readers do not expect to be designed, which is why designing them lands so well. We specified printed endpapers from the very first quote, so there was never a version of this book with blank inside covers.
The order was placed as a 210×210mm book. When the artwork came in from Kimberley's designer, our pre-flight checks measured the pages at 215.9mm square: the book had been built in inches, 8.5 by 8.5, and 8.5in is not 210mm. Rather than ask for 48 pages and a cover to be rebuilt, we changed the job to 216×216mm and had the cover resupplied at the exact wrap size the case needed, 485×256mm. It is a tiny difference on paper and a big one on press, and it is the most common mix-up we see from designers who work in imperial units. If you build in inches, tell us, and we will quote the metric equivalent from the start.
The illustrations are hand-drawn in coloured pencil with plenty of white paper left showing, which is why the inside stock moved during quoting from 120gsm uncoated to 170gsm silk. Silk is smooth and crisp, so the fine hatching of a hedgerow and the soft blue of an ice puddle reproduce with every stroke intact, and at 170gsm the pages have the weight of a proper picture book rather than a pamphlet. The cover follows the same logic: printed on 170gsm silk, matt laminated and wrapped over greyboard, with a white background and a single skating flower rather than a wall of graphics. It is refreshing to see a children's cover with that much air in it, and the matt film keeps the white clean through a hundred bedtime readings.
Nearly. The double-page map of Wildflower Hollow, with its Wibbly Wobbly Hills and Babbling Brook, is the spread everybody opens to, and photographed from a low angle you can see the pages settling almost flat at the gutter with only a gentle rise into the spine. Forty-eight pages on 170gsm silk give a 9mm spine, which is close to the minimum for a case-bound book, and a slim block like this one opens more willingly than a fat one. Anything that runs across the gutter, a map, a "whooosh" of skating flowers, should still keep its important details 10mm or so clear of the centre, and the layout here does.
The finished books went out to Buckinghamshire. Square hardback picture books at 28 to 48 pages are one of the formats we print most, so if you have a story of your own in a drawer, our children's book printing page covers sizes, papers and bindings, and our case study on Nippy the Baby Crocodile shows another case-bound picture book in the same family.
Get an instant price at exwhyzed.com, or tell Harriet and Mike your page count and trim size, in inches if you like, and we will take it from there.
