We are headed into the final stretch with the Histories of Newark 1758-2008. Rebecca Johnson Melvin, Jill and I traveled to Ivyland, Pennsylvania, to visit Downey Hoster at Hoster Bindery to approve the foil stamping on the hardback covers, to get a personal tour of the facility, and to talk about final details with the binding and delivery of the book.

It was also our first chance to see the final folding of the book’s signatures and the nesting of those signatures. There are some details we wanted in the book to help give it some sense of being handmade. Two things we did were to print the book on two colors of paper—vanilla and white and to leave the front edge of the book rough.

The book is printed in eight-page signatures (sheets with four pages on one side and four on the other which are folded in half both ways to get he pages oriented correctly). There is one signature in vanilla with two signatures in white nested inside each other. That way the book has 8 pages of vanilla followed by 16 pages of white. We thought it would give the book some texture. The other thing we wanted was a rough fore edge (the edge away from the spine). There was no way to do the book with deckle-edged (rough) paper (we would have loved to do it in handmade paper but we wouldn’t have gotten the book for another 22 years and the cost would about the same as putting in a city subway system). Anyway that fore edge is left untrimmed and it looked exactly like we had envisioned it.
Everything we’ve heard about Hoster Binder has been positive and after the visit we see why. Top notch equipment, personnel, vision, and the ability to see ways to contribute that the designer / printer can’t see.

One very nice element that Downey has added to our book is to round the spine. It seems like a small detail, but after having the architecture of the book explained from the point-of-view of the spine it is a must if you can have it. Once we get the book we’ll show some photos and explain some of these details.
The critical moment right now is Friday, December 7 at 6:00 pm. The Histories of Newark group along with the Mayor is having an opening ceremony along with a booksigning. We hope a lot of the authors come and we kind of wonder if anyone will want us to sign their copy of the book.

The dust jacket is also at the printer and should be printed on Monday. Another detail we wanted was to do a full dustjacket that folded over on the top and bottom. The jacket designed by Jill Cypher ended up being a perfect solution. We used a hand-drawn map of the city from 1820 and overlaid images of Newark people into the house shapes. It does a wonderful job of mimicking the inside look of the book.

We are getting three sets of the book in all of its parts. Wallflowers Press is donating one to Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library, one to the Newark Historical Society, and we will keep one. Once we get into our new letterpress studio feel free to stop in and take a look. It is an interesting process and this book was done right from the very start.

Here is the dust jacket opened up. The worn edges of the map show on the sides.

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