Sew your zines

I recently got a bookbinding kit on Amazon for $7 as I got very tired of choosing between reading zines on my tablet or paying $10 for the zine + $5 for shipping. I found it works well for anything up to about 100 pages. I don’t expect to buy a printed zine again unless a) I’m at a con/FLGS so no shipping, b) there’s interior color artwork, or c) it’s really long. So I will definitely be getting Knock #4 in print. For everything else, I’m paying $3-$5 for the PDF then spending ten minutes to print and bind it myself.

For instance, here is Secret of the Black Crag which is close to 100 pages. I feel like this has better binding than most of my orange spine AD&D books. Sewing through ~25 sheets of paper is tough, but doable with use of an awl. Just fold each piece of paper first, put them in a stack, punch four holes on the fold near the top and four near the bottom, then sew, starting on the outside so the knots go on the exterior spine.

The trick is that you a) use “singles” not “spreads,” b) have to use Adobe Acrobat to print “booklet,” and c) choose the starting page carefully. It’s important to have the odd numbered pages on the right and even on the left so that map spreads and the like appear left and right rather than front and back. Alas, sometimes covers mess this up. Here are the thumbnails for Black Crag and you can see the table of contents is on page 4, not the page 3 it should be. The solution is to print pages 2-97.

As you can see, the table of contents is recto, which means later on the map spreads are verso then recto, not recto front then verso back. Note that I print with “save toner” checked because otherwise white on black pages will use a ton of it.

Finally, I sometimes print a cover on cardstock. To do this still print a booklet but only print the page one (the cover). If you want to print the back cover too, you’ll have to composite it in photo editing software because DriveThru DRM doesn’t let you edit PDFs.

One thing I tried but don’t recommend is sewing several 32 page booklets together (more or less how most actual books are made). I tried this with the Scientific Barbarian zine above and it was way more trouble than it’s worth. If I have to print a >100 pages zine again I’ll probably just make it two booklets.