Tarot Folk Tales by Noah Rogers: an illustrated zine printed black on yellow

• Format: A5 portrait (210 x 148mm)
• Cover: 4pp on 300gsm Lessebo Sunflower, unlaminated
• Inside pages: 28pp on 120gsm Lessebo Sunflower
• Printing: Black throughout
• Binding: Staple bound

Noah Rogers came to us with one question. Could the paper inside his zine be yellow, with the artwork printed over it in greyscale? The zine is issue one of Tarot Folk Tales, a series that pairs each of the 78 tarot cards with a European folk tale, myth or legend sharing its meaning, each one illustrated as a card for a deck called Albion’s Last Giant. First up is the Eight of Wands, a card about snowballing progress, told through The Lay of Horn-Skinned Siegfried. The finished illustrated zine is A5 and 32 pages, black ink on Lessebo Sunflower from front cover to back, stapled twice at the fold.

Black, not grey, on a coloured sheet

Yellow paper was easy. We buy coloured stock from the Lessebo Colours range, and Mike suggested Canary or Sunflower. Noah went for Sunflower. Greyscale was the part we talked him out of. Printing inks are translucent, so a grey tint over a strong yellow has no white beneath it to stay clean against. “Grey might look washed out,” Mike told him, and recommended solid black.

The result proves the point. Black type on that yellow is stark and very easy to read, and the line illustrations look as if they were inked straight onto the page.

A second worry surfaced at proof stage. Noah feared the white areas left in his drawings would print as white patches. They cannot. A press has no white ink, so anything white in the artwork is simply left bare and takes the shade of the sheet. “You’ve set my mind at ease,” he replied, and approved.

Name the cover stock as well as the pages

Here is a tip this job handed us. To a printer, a zine is two components, a four page cover and the text pages, and a quote lists a paper for each. Noah’s earliest copies had Sunflower pages inside a white cover of matt laminated silk. With them in his hands he knew the yellow had to run right through, so the edition in our photographs wears a cover of 300gsm Lessebo Sunflower over 120gsm pages of the same shade. If you ask for a special paper, say whether you mean the cover, the insides or both.

He also wondered about keeping the matt laminate. Harriet advised against it. Film over the yellow would mute the colour and leave the outside a touch paler than the pages within, and an uncoated sheet carrying only black needs no such protection. Noah agreed: “let’s not laminate, it sounds like it will look better without.”

A ballad from the age of Gutenberg, held by two staples

The story is Noah’s mostly faithful adaptation of “Das Lied vom Hurnen Seyfrid”, an anonymous German ballad of the 15th or 16th century. He notes that its popularity owes a lot to how close it sat, in time and place, to the invention of Gutenberg’s press, a footnote any printer will enjoy. The cover shows Siegfried bathing in dragon’s blood, almost invincible but for the spot between his shoulders where a linden leaf fell.

The typography has flair to match: blackletter titles, an old style serif for the telling, and drop capitals borrowed from a 1921 edition of the Nibelung saga illustrated by E. R. Vogenauer. The back cover promises “Splendid, startling, and wyrd!”. Stapling suits it. A thin booklet that falls open makes people want to pick it up and read, and 32 pages sit comfortably in the fold.

Our file check played its part along the way. It showed the tale had grown to 32 pages from the 24 first ordered, and that the artwork needed 3mm of bleed, which Noah added in InDesign. When the all yellow copies landed he wrote: “These arrived today and they look amazing, I’m really happy with them, thanks for everything!” The next card, Justice, is already in progress as Kriemhild’s Revenge.

If folklore is your territory, have a look at Cunning Folk magazine. Our article on choosing paper for a zine goes deeper on stocks, and you can price yours under zine printing. Tell us the colour you have in your head and we will hunt down the sheet.