Producing a B&W book

The only way to get around color shift is to be there at press time. You sit there and demand to see the pulls from the run. Then they will get it right.

I have seen ad agents sit there for hours, from the beginning of their run to the end, making sure that what was getting done was what their client would approve.

The reason why many ads have looked well over the years was because many ad agencies actually send their people to the pressroom. They will sit there and wait and supervise.

If you have a colorshift by shape, it's a sign that they just printed whatever. This would be a case where, say, a red shape overlapped the edge.

Thing is, if you wait until they are done with the run to inspect it, they've already torn down and set up for something else. So, depending on your relationship with the printer, you may have the last print run thrust upon you or your bill.

When I worked in a newspaper factory, we would fill up large recycle bins, I mean industrial dumpster size, in a few days. It was largely with cast off factory cardboard packing, and hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of rejects.

No one ever sees the rejects, except for maybe the paper recycle contractor.

To make matters worse, I get the impression that a lot of people in publishing, now in "the digital age" actually believe that digital press runs are "error free." I wouldn't know whether to laugh, cuss, or take a sledgehammer to the press frame.

You want quality work done, it is likely that you will need to supervise.

I'll tell ya this: for decades, the owners of our old newspaper used to walk the entire newspaper, all the way through the factory, step by step, from sales and editorial all the way down to the trucks.

Daily.

On Thanksgiving, the toughest day of the year in the newspaper business, editorial staff would spend some time in the factory, "feeding a head," putting inserts into a machine.

You want quality? Get over there.

At about four o'clock in the morning, if a certain event didn't happen, I, a humble factory worker, would receive a phone call from the Iron Lady asking what happened. The Iron Lady of Publishing.

She never threw her weight around, got mad or yelled, but she would call. There was a reason why she wasn't there at the time.

She stayed in touch. She cared about her print run. Every day, every time.

That is how you get a good publication done.

Don't be surprised if you meet people who are under the impression that that type of thing is not done anymore. Do it anyway. That's how it's done.

John,
Thanks a lot for your response. I will definitely make sure to take that into mind - in truth, I actually prefer I hands on approach, rather than just leaving everything to be done and then getting the final product.
However, are there not also any differences in the printing? Generally, books that are privately published will be done on a CMYK printer, which will use the colours to achieve richer blacks (but thus may result in the blacks being slightly coloured). Do commercial printers use special methods for black and white books (e.g. different printers), to achieve the quality that they do? For example, the quality of Africa by Salgado (published by Taschen) is absolutely stunning - the blacks are really rich and detailed. I know that they will probably have their own printing houses, but is it possible to achieve similar quality if publishing privately?
Many thanks,
Anatole

Anatole--If you are looking for that kind of quality, you will need to spend a lot more money than it will cost to do something with Blurb or the other self publishing companies. They are essentially using big color copier/inkjet printers, and you are right that they are using CMYK to do black and white. Published books from large publishers are printed differently, with ink on paper and a good black and white book is frequently printed as a duotone or tritone, where two or three colors of ink are used with separate plates to "build" the black and tonal range necessary for the quality of the project.

Andrew,
Should I wish to print it in this way (duotone/tritone), which companies should I approach? At the moment I am in very early stages of planning the book, and while it will be much more expensive it may still be a preferable route - I would just quite like to cover all the possibilities.
Anatole

Anatole,
If I were you, I would look for a good printer in your area that does high quality corporate annual report work, since they will have the equipment and the skilled people necessary to provide you with the quality that you need, while being available to you to watch the job on press so that you can see it as it is produced. Another way to find a printer is to look in the back of a book of photographs that looks like what you want, and use them.

I've bookmarked this thread for future reference. I've never seen a better description on photo.net of how the repro printing process should be done than John's. Even in junior college we went through exactly what he described as part of our training. As editors we were responsible for checking out everything, including the quality of the press run.