FINAL PROOF NEWSLETTER: THE BEGINNING OF THE ENDPAPERS

The shop took on a new tenant this week, a copier the size of a compact car that rumbled down the sidewalk, past the stiletto-wearing diplomats zippin’ around Midtown on scooters (UN week is a weird one), and up the freight elevator. It’s a Canon Image Press Lite, purchased to provide a little stability needed in the shop after our beleaguered Konica Minolta has been taking more than a few personal days in the last few weeks. The Canon is a used machine. Came up from Florida wrapped in saran, stashed in the back of a truck. It spent a week in New Jersey before they figured out what to do with it. But it’s here now. I’m told it was a display model, but they didn’t seem to know much more than that. Time will tell what that means for the shop, but let’s hope it means less downtime. They tell me “a guy” is coming next week to turn it on and get it rolling. There’s always “a guy” in the Garment District who is coming to solve your problems. They don’t always do it, but they’re always there.

While the machine settled in, I spent the better part of the week building endpapers for The Spy. Endpapers are a crucial component of any book. They build a long-lasting connection between paper and case. The paper needs to be high strength, usually in the 170 gsm neighborhood. Sometimes a little more or a little less, depending on the size of the book. It’s heavier than a page, lighter than a cover. They get printed, then cut, folded, and secured to the first and last signature of the book with cambric tape. When it finally gets to the sewer, the thread slides through the paper and the cambric, adding strength before any glue gets involved. There’s probably an easier way to do it but I haven’t figured it out yet. Some might say that it’s soothing to stand there and build them one by one. Fold. Fold. Tape. Fold. Do it 200 times. I tried to remember that when I was in the mid-120’s on those. Results were mixed.

Next week, the tempo shifts. It’s needle and thread time, sewing the blocks together, pulling hundreds of sheets into something that can finally call itself a block. I’ll move behind the sewer, loading paper, and doing math in my head as I go. In 4-sheet signatures, they’ll get loaded, folded, and sewn into blocks. We’ll begin to see The Spy take shape. After that, it’s time to press, glue, and put some jackets on.

This week on the Smoke and Hat Podcast we talked about a wild UN General Assembly week in New York City. Donnie’s escalator stopped, his teleprompter broke, and he told everyone their country’s were going to hell. Besides that, things went well. Macron and Erdogan couldn’t cross the street, Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey, demonstrated a keen understanding of the Arabic language, and pretty much everyone besides the United States and Israel recognized Palestine as a state. Give it a listen over on the podcast page.