Producing Poysers

A few people have been asking how we brought all these Poysers back from the publishing backwater of out-of-print and into the light once more. So, in a peanutshell, here's a run through of the process.

These days, books are laid out using programmes such as Quark or Indesign, from which PDF files are produced that are sent for printing, but this has only been going on for 10 years or so. Before then things were a bit more primitive, and you don't have to go too much further back and designers would actually cut out illustrations, paste them onto a board with the text on it in blocks, then photograph the result and use that for printing. The upshot of this is that there are no PDFs or anything else besides the actual books for pretty much all of the Poysers. So in order to print brand new copies, the first stage was to get each title into a digital format.

Even we didn't have some of the books, due to their scarcity, so first I had to buy copies that were missing from a variety of second-hand sources. I then sent them off to our scanners. They scanned each page to the highest quality possible, and the digital files produced were then cleaned and sent off to the printers, Martins, who are based in Berwick Upon Tweed.

A trio of Poyser scarcities.

Each copy requires rather a lot of craftsmanship. Martins use the files to print the text, with the colour and any black and white sections printed seperately on gloss art paper. These are then inserted into the book at the right place, and the book is then glued and lined to form an unbound copy, known as a bookblock.

Next the endpapers are glued to the bookblock to give it strength, and the cloth of the jacket is cut to size. This is glued firmly to the boards that will make up the case. The bookblock is attached to the case, and the near-complete book is left in a clamp to dry.

The book is finished with the jacket, which has been printed separately, again from a digital file that matches a pristine copy of the original – the only difference is on the back cover, where I decided to include a standard list of the series. The originals had all sorts of things on the back, usually incomplete lists of the series up to the point of publication.

With this the book is ready to be sent out to the reader! I am secretly quite happy that we are using some quite old-fashioned book production techniques, allied with some that are rather more cutting edge in producing the e-book versions of each title. The Poyser list - a real blend of the old and the new.