A Cool Printing Mistake

I've been knee-deep finalizing the third Little Brown Spider book, "A Mouse in the House," the last couple of weeks. At this stage, I do many, many, many printings of what I call a "proof-of-a-proof." I print out and put together as close a version as possible to the actual printer's before ordering a copy.

Now That's a Lot of Ink

It's a time-consuming process. Lots of printing. Lots of trimming. Lots of stapling and reading through from beginning to end. An edit here and an edit there. Let's move this block of text a little farther away from the margin on this page and a little closer to the image on this page. Let's soften the backmatter page color a bit. Let's change this phrasing to have a more active voice. How about we try putting the gutter on the right-side instead of the left-side for this double-page spread? Great, another four pages to print. And so on...

Don't Forget to Flip!

Given all this printing and back and forth, there are bound to be mistakes, especially since I print on both sides of my 32lbs proof-of-a-proof paper. Again, want to get it as close as possible to the actual proof. So, there's flipping involved. Odd pages on one side, even pages on the flip (long) side.

There was a learning curve doing this for the first book, but I've gotten pretty good at it since. Not too many mistakes. But mistakes do happen. One happened yesterday, in fact. I printed an even page on the same side of an already printed odd page. I forgot to flip. Instead of a completely hideous amalgamation, it ended up being something pretty cool looking.

The surprising oddities of printing an odd and even page on the same side.

Yeah, I think I'll keep this one out of the trash.

- DennisD.

SpiderWriter