There is no lack of interesting or complex projects with plenty of “wow” factor and lots of bells and whistles from Hong Kong and China print players. The Imago team, for instance, recently worked with Bright Stripes on their Splash-Tastic series of color-reveal art activity books for kids that include refillable water pens. Each book spread requires three printing passes. The first is a four-color image plus inline machine varnish. A flood layer of water-reactive ink is then silkscreened over that, followed by another silkscreen layer to provide the outline that creates the black-and-white image.

“Getting the right balance of opacity for the water reactive ink was one major challenge,” Musk says. “If the ink is applied too thick, the revealed image would be dim and cloudy. Too thin, and the colors underneath would be visible through the top layer even when fully dry. We also printed counter displays for these books, and we handled the full safety testing for both the book and the pen to ensure compliance with U.S. regulations covering both toys and art products.”

Then there is the facsimile of the first edition of Pride and Prejudice to celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. The set is packaged in a clamshell case that includes a special compartment to house the reproductions of handwritten letters, documents, and other ephemera from Austen’s archive and personal effects, as well as a booklet containing an expert introduction by the collection’s head curator.

The main challenge was replicating the materials and colors from the originals. “Getting a good match to the marbled paper on the case sides required plenty of testing, and we had to add a metallic PMS to the CMYK,” says Musk, whose team was very excited to work with the British Library on the project, which was simultaneously published by Rizzoli (U.S.). “Another surprising challenge came in the form of the letters written during the Georgian period, which used every available space on the paper with the writing extending to the very edge of the page. This was tricky as we could not apply our usual bleed areas.”

Over at Toppan Leefung, the team worked with English artist Es Devlin, who is renowned for her stage designs, on An Atlas of Es Devlin. “To meet the ambitious nine-month delivery deadline, our Toppan team worked closely with the artist’s studio and Thames & Hudson,” says Mae Zhao, SVP of marketing and head of international sales.

The complexity of the design pushed the team to create a cubic format for the book, bringing together a diverse range of paper and substrate options, including recycled, grained kraft, uncoated, tracing paper, acetate, and mirror sheets. “Toppan’s innovation included intricate design elements like accordion folds, gatefolds, die-cuts, and nonstandard threads. Given that the background color of most pages consisted of a four-color gray instead of a spot color, maintaining consistency throughout the book on various substrates was a challenge. Ensuring that all precisely die-cut pieces were aligned perfectly so that the visuals were placed and opened according to Es Devlin’s creative vision was difficult to achieve with industry-standard machine tolerances.”

Covering more than 866 pages with varying page sizes made it impossible to rely completely on automatic machine sewing, Zhao says. “This epic title with exacting and exquisite registration and detailed spot UV showcases the painstaking teamwork, from Es Devlin herself down to our workers on the assembly line. Es Devlin pushed the boundary of a physical book, bringing to readers more than 700 color images documenting 120 projects spanning 30 years, and we believe Toppan Leefung delivered a book to be reckoned with for decades to come.” This experiential publication, regarded as the most complicated book in the world, comes with a die-cut print from an edition of 5,000 copies.

Return to main feature.