January 2007 - All About Soft Covers

If your soft cover will include printing on the inside, remove inks and coatings from the spine plus 7/16” for Otabind (pictured) or 1/4” for perfect binding.

“Never judge a book by its cover”?

At Muscle Bound, we respectfully disagree. A properly-designed, expertly-executed cover is critical to how a book will look and function. Planning your cover requires careful attention to detail and plenty of communication between printer, bindery and designer.
                                 
This month, we will offer tips on soft cover planning; in February, look for case binding cover planning hints:

Run Covers Grain Parallel – Whenever possible, the grain direction of soft covers should be parallel with the spine and the text pages for maximum strength and adhesion.  In some cases cross-grain covers are admissible, but the resulting book may exhibit a host of problems: a reduction in durability and flexibility; waviness and chipping out on the spine; a non-square backbone; cracking when scoring the backbone and side scores; and difficulty opening.

Measure Accurate Spine Thickness – To ensure proper cover fit, measurements should be taken using a pre-production sample of your book block. Your sample should be created from the exact text stock used for the production run. This is a superior and more accurate procedure than calculating spine thickness from a paper caliper chart.

Include a Glue Trap – Incorporate a 1/16” glue margin at the head and foot of your cover layouts. This extra margin, which helps eliminate excess binding adhesive from building up on machinery and subsequent covers, should be added to the head and foot margins of your untrimmed covers to overhang untrimmed signatures.

Knock Out Inks and Coatings – Inks and coatings on inside covers should be removed from each side of the spine area to ensure proper adhesion. For perfect-bound books, remove an additional 1/4” to account for the hinge score. Otabind book covers will receive additional scores, so remove 7/16” on the inside front and back covers as well as the front and back page to account for the outermost scores.

The Muscle Bound Advantage
With both perfect binding and Otabind binding capabilities in-house, © 2010 Muscle Bound Bindery offers you two of the strongest soft cover adhesive binding options available. Combined with our extensive hardcover case binding capabilities, Muscle Bound is your single source for strong, durable binding solutions. Give us a call to discuss top-quality binding solutions for your next book project.