How Our Books Come To Life: A Trip To China!

After treating you to a sneak preview of our relaunched You Wouldn’t Want to Be series in its production stages, we thought we’d tell you a little more about just how we make our books so fancy…

As we showed you in our last post, our You Wouldn’t Want to be books, to be published January 2014, are still proofs in their early production stages. Abit like caterpillars that have yet to become beautiful butterflies. And, believe us, there are a lot more stages that have to occur before our titles can spread their wings! There’s a careful, complex and intricate process that goes into making every book at The Salariya Book Company; whether it’s Scribblers, Book House or Scribo, we take a lot of pride in our craft.

But what actually happens to our titles? Just how do our books come to life? Well, for one thing, it doesn’t all happen here at Book House — or even in this country! To find out exactly how our books are made, Managing Director David Salariya and Production Co-Ordinator went all the way to Leo Paper Products Ltd… in China.

This mini model gives you an idea of the vast scale of Leo…

Huge, eh? In one of these gargantuan buildings is the Pre-Flight testing department, where electronic copies of our books are scrutinised by professionals for any little glitch that could happen in printing. Here’s a colleague at Leo checking How To Draw and Colour Steampunk Characters (coming soon!):

After Pre-Flight have given the book a thumbs-up, it is sent to the Proof Department for the next stage. Here, the colour matches are determined, to work out what colours will work best with the title. Here’s David Brine checking over some with Leo staff Allen Wong and Pheobe Lu:

The colour matches are produced in huge printers, and are then shipped to us here at Book House to look over. Look, here’s Little Bear’s Shapes and Little Bear’s Alphabet (Scribblers, out early 2014!) being printed off in Leo…

… Only to arrive a week later on our desks right here in Brighton!

Once colours have been finalised, our decisions go BACK to Leo to be printed as ‘printed signature flat sheets.’ For example, here’s You Wouldn’t Want To Be A Greek Athlete (Book House — released January 2014) in its final stages in China:

So, now all that’s left for this title is that it must be folded, gathered and trimmed — then sewn together and glued. The cover is then drawn on the front and voila! The finished product is ready!

Good things certainly do come to those who wait — we can’t wait to see the final result!