279x216mm Portrait Casebound Books
Cover onto WIBALIN® FINELINEN WBF548 PUMICE with white foil title to spine only
Wrapped over greyboard case
Debossed with a tipped in image glued on 150x200mm
Full colour single sided onto self adhesive paper
2x 4pp End Papers unprinted onto 170gsm Uncoated
192 inside pages onto 170gsm Silk
Four colour throughout
Section sewn, add head n tail bands and case bound.
We Are Subculture is the kind of project we love — a big-hearted photography book with serious production ambition behind it. It’s built to celebrate individuality in the climbing community, with short written pieces woven through the imagery, and it’s set up as a not-for-profit fundraiser supporting Mind. (ukclimbing.com)
On the print side, the cover is the headline: Wibalin® Finelinen cloth, a debossed circle, and a tipped-in photo that turns the book into an object you want to pick up. It’s a premium move (and realistically only makes sense at 500+ copies) — but for this concept, it’s absolutely the right call.
We Are Subculture is a photography coffee table hardback by Marsha Balaeva, created to show the diversity, creativity, and non-conformism of climbers — and to make space for honest mental health stories alongside the images. (ukclimbing.com)
It’s also a fundraiser: the project is set up so that all profits are donated to Mind via Work for Good. (Work for Good)
From a reader’s point of view, it’s a proper “slow down and look” book — big full-bleed photographs, then calmer spreads where text and image share the room. That rhythm matters in a long, image-led hardback: it stops the book feeling like a never-ending scroll and gives the stories space to land.
This is a 279 × 216mm portrait casebound hardback, section sewn with head and tail bands, and 192 pages printed in full colour throughout on 170gsm silk.
The cover is wrapped in WIBALIN® FINELINEN WBF548 PUMICE, with a debossed area and a tipped-in image (printed single-sided onto self-adhesive stock).
Endpapers are unprinted 170gsm uncoated — a simple choice that feels intentional against a bold photo book. (It also keeps the focus on the cloth cover and the photography.)
Printer’s-eye view: that 170gsm silk is doing a lot of work here — heavy enough to give the photographs some authority, but still comfortable to turn through at 192pp without becoming a brick.
The cover’s strength is its restraint: cloth texture first, then a controlled hit of detail. In the photos you can see the clean foil on the spine and the white foil linework sitting sharply on the cloth — a high-contrast look that suits the subject and signals “special edition” without shouting.
Then you’ve got the debossed circular feature holding the tipped-in photograph — a little “window” moment that pulls you in before you’ve even opened the book.
A key practical note from the journey: when you’ve got foil elements that run close to the edges, we’ll always check coverage across the wrapped case and ask for extensions where needed — so nothing falls short on the finished hardback.
This one had a thoughtful, real-world beginning: the project needed to balance presentation and cost so the book could raise as much money as possible for charity.
Early on, we sent sample hardbacks and labelled them with specs so Marsha could make confident choices — and she came back saying she loved the print and production quality, and that the labels helped decision-making.
As the design developed, the book shifted up in scale — from an initial smaller idea to the final 279 × 216mm format after working with physical samples and liking those proportions better.
When the designer dropped out near the finish line, we stepped in with practical guidance: templates, how to separate foil layers, and how to supply pages correctly for print.
(If you’re planning something similar, start here: /printed-project-builder/ and we’ll map the whole job with you.)
