We had been designing as though production capacity were a matter of equipment.
The bindery is directly below our studio, which for four years meant we heard it and never visited it. Last spring we finally asked whether we could stand in a corner for three days, and Nadia Pike, who has run the floor since 1998, said yes on the condition that we did not ask questions during a run.
The first thing that becomes obvious is that a book is a sequence of machines, and the design decisions that cause trouble are the ones that make a book pass through a machine awkwardly. Our full-bleed images on a sewn text block had been causing a trimming problem for years — the bleed allowance we had been specifying was correct for a perfect-bound book and wrong for a sewn one, and nobody had told us because the bindery had simply been absorbing it.
The second thing is that grain direction is not a detail. We knew, in the way you know things from a textbook, that paper grain should run parallel to the spine. Watching a hundred and twenty covers curl on a humid afternoon because a cost-driven stock substitution had rotated the grain is a different kind of knowing. We now put grain direction on the specification sheet in the same size as the trim, and we have twice paid more for stock because of it.
The third thing was not technical at all. The floor has four people on it and every one of them can tell, by feel, whether a signature has been folded correctly. That skill takes about two years to acquire and is not written down anywhere. It is also, at current volumes, the binding constraint on how many books the shop can make in a week — not the machines, which are idle half the time. We had been designing as though production capacity were a matter of equipment.
We came back with a list of eleven things to change in our own specifications. Nine of them were things we had been getting wrong quietly for years, at somebody else's cost. The list is pinned above the plan chest and gets added to.