Work Experience at Short Run Press

I spent a couple of days over the last two weeks taking part in work experience with Short Run Press in Exeter. They are a family run digital and lithographic printing company, established in 1981. Their customers include global publishers, learned societies, small presses and numerous individual authors. Whether you want 50 or 15,000 copies of a book they will print at a competitive price and to a high standard.

I was really impressed with the ecological care they took, ensuring minimal wastage and focusing on reusing and repurposing packaging materials.

I spent time with their Typesetter and Designer, Kevin, who works primarily with those who are self-publishing their work. His work varies from simply creating a cover design and arranging some images to completely designing the book as he transfers someone's work from a Word doc into InDesign and formats the entire document. He works closely with customers to understand their vision. His work varies from annual society magazines to memoirs and personal family histories intended as gifts for grandchildren.

I also shadowed Simon and Brett who work in Pre-Press, prepping a job to go from a digital document to a physical printed version. They check the colours on the page, ensure there are no errors, create bleed, and convert the document so it can be printed onto a plate in the case of lithographic printing.

I then headed downstairs to shadow their printers, folders, gatherers, packers, and more! I worked on the gathering machine, prepping a book to be perfect bound. I also helped stack sewn bound book sections, ready to be covered. I worked on quality control as hard back books were finished. I hole punched and wire bound books. Finally, I helped pack orders ready to be shipped.

Digital printing is essentially an industrial sized version of your home printer. Lithographic printing is a more traditional way of printing where a layer of silicone is chemically fused onto an aluminium plate where the letters and images will be. The excess silicone is then washed off, leaving just the text and images of what they want to print. These plates then go through the huge rolling printing presses, either through just the first roller if it's black ink only, or also through the cyan, magenta, and yellow. There is also the option to add a gloss finish as the final roller. The ink is manually added and the printer is constantly manned to check for errors, jams, and to quality control.

The technology and ingenuity to create these printing presses is unbelievable. There are robotic arms, suction cups, air blowers, all sorts. Seen below - the grey arm blows air at a specific angle to slightly lift the top piece of paper so the suction cup can be lowered to pick up and move along that piece of paper. It all happens so fast you wouldn't believe it.

After this the paper is fed through the rollers, all of which have the aluminium plate fitted to them to print this job. At the end of the line the final product is revealed and stacked, this then needs to dry before it can be folded, bound, a cover added, and then trimmed.

There are several binding options:

• Perfect bound: the pages are gathered and held together by robot arms, the spine is then trimmed and glued into the cover. This allows for a flat spine, you're probably most familiar with seeing this in novels and books that don't need to lay flat when open. Once the glue has cooled the book is then trimmed with a three-knife trimmer, which trims the head, tail, and fore-edge (opposite side from the spine).

• Saddle stitch: this is misleadingly named as the book is stapled through the centre, commonly scene in exercise books, guidebooks, really any shorter length book that doesn't need to exist forever. This method also allows for the quickest turn around time.

• Sewn: as it sounds the book is gathered and sewn together, possibly in sections depending on the length of the book, then gathered again and a cover added. This is done by what looks like an oversized overlocker machine. This is great for books that need to lay flat such as music scores.

• Wire bound: here the book is hole punched and then a wire spine is manually added. Often seen in notebooks or professional manuals.

• Case bound: after binding the publisher or author may choose to add a hard back cover that has another paper or cloth cover, this is wrapped around the hard back cover and glued down with excess being wrapped around the inside hard cover. Often seen in coffee table books.

• Burst bound: is similar to perfect bound except the spine edge is not trimmed and so you can see the gathered pages have been glued and then attached to the cover. If you look at the spine of a burst bound book you will see the pages are gathered into either 16 or 32 page sections.

Three-knife trimmer.

Short Run Press keep one of every book they print. Typically so they can quickly and easily recall typesetting and printing style for a repeat customer order.

Here is an example of two self published books about Devon and Cornwall.

It was a great couple of weeks meeting the team and understanding how a book goes from a Word doc to a physical book. I also had an opportunity to chat with their new head of sales which was incredibly valuable. Overall, everything I learnt would never have been possible to learn without actually spending time there and witnessing all the happenings and I'm very glad I took the time to do so. Thank you to Short Run Press!