Entre is French for between, and Tom Breeton puts his title in the gap. On the cover, a sharp green field on the left dissolves into grey fog on the right, and the lower case word sits in white inside the haze, underlined, with First Issue set in italics beneath it.
Tom is a designer and art director, and he wrote down what he was making. It is printed in small white italics on the black inside front cover, directly under the title:
Compact, full-colour photography book focusing on the nostalgic elements of travelling. The book includes extracts from corresponding poetry and literature.
Read the spec against that sentence and the two line up phrase by phrase. So we have borrowed his phrases as the headings below, with our printer’s commentary underneath.
Compact, full colour
Compact meant A5. The book is 148 x 210mm and perfect bound, with 50 inside pages of 120gsm uncoated wrapped in a 300gsm uncoated cover, matt laminated on its outer face. It slips into a coat pocket, which seems right for a book that opens on passengers climbing the airstairs of a SWISS jet, framed in white.
Full colour on uncoated stock is a deliberate trade. On an uncoated sheet the ink sinks in rather than sitting up on a sealed surface, so colour softens a touch and contrast relaxes. With greens this lush and fog this thick, that softness belongs. The matt laminate keeps the cover just as hushed while protecting a book that is likely to travel. If your own photographs lean hazy or filmic, ask for uncoated and prepare your files expecting gentler contrast than your screen shows. It is one of the more restrained specs to pass through our photo book printing studio, and all the better for it.
The nostalgic elements of travelling
Tom’s pictures are the in between parts of a trip, the ones most of us never think to frame: cloud wrapped mountains, a train carriage in silvery monochrome, red and white chevron shutters, a neat stack of firewood. They sit on the page in three ways. A few spill over the spine and off every trimmed edge, like an alpine meadow under a misty sky. Some sit inside white borders. Others shrink to small black and white insets floating on colour, such as a grid of windows dropped onto a pale blue sky with birds.
Changing how images sit changes how fast you read, and that keeps a slim book surprising. Uncoated paper helps here too. The black pages print deep and matt, so they act as rests between bursts of colour.
Extracts from corresponding poetry
The contents list on the inside cover names five travelling companions: T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, Bob Dylan’s It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), Thoreau’s Walden, Walt Whitman’s O Me! O Life! and Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. Opposite a misty monochrome range, Eliot’s we shall not cease from exploration is set large in a light serif, with the rest of the passage in small italics below. Thoreau appears white on black, facing a dark ridge of forest. Dylan is pared down to busy being born, Frost to two roads, and Whitman’s line runs across the meadow sky.
Five extracts across 50 pages makes each one an occasion. If you are pairing your own photographs with writing, ration the words and give each a picture that answers it; our guide to laying out a photo book that carries text goes further into the balance.
Framed prints in a range of sizes
The last line on the inside cover sends readers to Tom’s website for framed prints, available in a range of sizes. It is a smart move. The book doubles as a catalogue for the wall, and anyone stopped by the fog can take a picture home at a bigger scale.
The same discipline runs through the spec: one trim size, one paper family, one cover finish, one binding. Our task was to carry that intent onto paper, so the fog stays soft rather than muddy and the black pages stay rich rather than grey. A slim perfect bound book still needs a true, square spine and a cover file built to fit it, and this page on sizing a cover for a glued spine shows how that file is put together.
To compare uncoated with silk under your own lamp before you choose, ask for a set of printed swatches.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
