The other week Ian Fleming Publications visited CPI, the printers who are putting together our new editions of Ian Fleming’s classic works. We were able to see the first copies of the Casino Royale hot off the press!
If you’ve ever wondered what goes into making a physical book, today’s your lucky day – take a tour along the production line below, hi-vis optional. For some video clips from the day, head over to our Instagram and check out our latest story highlight.
This is just one of sixteen CPI sites worldwide. They print on average 450 million books a year.CPI had just received a delivery of paper when we arrived. Paper varies by weight, density and colour. For our paperbacks we discussed the best options with CPI and chose a paper which had good opacity, excellent ink absorption and thick enough to feel substantial but not too thick as to slow the fast pace of Ian Fleming’s writing!Paper being fed in for internal printing.Text pages created for our new edition of Goldfinger. We printed all sixteen of our new paperback releases simultaneously – a major undertaking that we had planned for with CPI over the course of the last year.Hundreds of text pages are printed per minute and altogether our entire first printing of Casino Royale was completed in less than two hours.The interior text pages of a novel are assembled in sets of two, with both books printed simultaneously on the same sheet of paper. Here the picture shows the first page of Casino Royale at the top with the last page at the bottom.Books are printed in sections of eight, twelve or sixteen. These sections are called ‘signatures’. Our new paperbacks are printed in signatures of eight.The covers were printed at a different CPI site which specialises in cover printing. These covers required a great level of ink density and were then finished with a soft touch matt lamination. They were then shipped to the main paperback site to be matched with the text pages.This is the reverse side of the cover. As with the text pages, two covers are printed on one sheet, with the front side of one cover opposite the back inside of the other.All the paperbacks are glued together along the spine. This is a vat of dried glue, the individual plugs of glue are melted and applied to the spines.
The glue and ink needs time to dry. The factory floor is designed in such a way so that by the time the books have travelled to the next part of the assembly line they have already sufficiently cooled down ready for the next stage.
The books are stacked with the cover cut to size but the text pages still need to be trimmed.Books are checked for quality control.The books now completely cut to size.Samples of the metallic foils that can be used for cover finishes. This is just one of the many, many optional finishes that CPI can offer to make a book look extra special, including embossing, debossing, spot varnish and sprayed edges. One of our new editions features gold foiling on the cover – see if you can guess which one.Left to right: Chairman and Ian Fleming’s nephew, Fergus Fleming, Publishing Director Simon Ward, Managing Director Corinne Turner and Editorial and Administration Assistant Frederika Park.And here’s the finished book! Look out for new copies of Casino Royale, as well as all thirteen of the other Bond stories & Fleming’s two non-fiction titles, in bookshops near you from April 13th…
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