A book report — Matchprints & mechanicals

This is part of a series about my experiences in publishing a book.The series starts here.

I met with Jerry Takigawa yesterday, and he showed me several things that Hemlock had provided:

• A complete mechanical proof of the book, with low resolution and inaccurate color.
• A mechanical proof of the dust cover, showing how the French fold will work, and the die-cut rounded edges that I added to keep the corners from snagging.
• A set of all the book pages printed using the Kodak Matchprint contract proofing process (Kodak licensed the name from 3M some time ago, and the current version has nothing to do with 3M’s four layer technology.
• A Matchprint proof of the dust jacket
• A set of proofs showing the locations where the varnish will be added.
• A proof of the dust jacket that had been laminated with the same material we’re going to use of the real dust jacket.

Basically, things looked pretty good. Jerry and I agreed that he’d find someone to do one last proofreading pass; nothing like having a thousand copies of some oopsie that makes your face red every time you see it.

The die-cut rounding on the dust jacket looks like it will do what I had hoped. Jerry was a little worried that it was too close to my headshot, but I think it’ll be fine.

I checked the mechanicals briefly, then asked Jerry to get them to the proofreader. I took the Matchprints home.

Today, I went over the Matchprints. There were three images that needed some more work. On one of them, an area near the top that looked of on the crop that I normally use looked weird when the image was set up for a full-bleed page. I cropped it in Lr, then converted it to CMYK. There were two images that just lost their oomph in the Matchprint at the size they were going to be in the book. I fixed them in Lr, and converted them to CMYK.

My next worry is the spot-color type that we’re using for captions and the footer. The text of both of these is pretty small, and it’s hard to read when it’s gray. We’re currently using a Pantone black/white ink mix at 50% of each. I asked Jerry what he thought about taking that up to 60% black, 40% white. That will affect some other areas of the book where Jerry is using that spot color as a graphic element. It will also affect, in a good way, I think, a few places in the book where there is white text against that spot color used as a background.

I also asked Jerry if we could loosen up the leading in the captions to make them more readable.

There were a couple of places where the text in the footer looked like the letters had different weighting. I expect that this is due to the Matchprint’s inability to precisely simulate spot colors, but I asked Jerry to talk to Hemlock and see what they thought.