Book Reviews: Scientific & Engineering Publishing

Print Production: A Complete Guide to Planning, Printing and Packaging

Margherita Mariano. 2024. San Francisco, CA: Laurence King. [ISBN 978-1-52943-015-8. 264 pages, including index.

Index Terms — binding, offset printing, pre-press, print production

Reviewed by Kelly Harrison

Many technical communicators these days write exclusively for the digital world, so what happens if you’re suddenly asked to produce a printed book or pamphlet? If you need to work with printed materials but aren’t familiar with the trade, read Print Production: A Complete Guide to Planning, Printing, and Packaging, a highly accessible and informative resource.

This book isn’t about how to get a black-and- white text, like a novel, printed through print-on-demand services, like Amazon; instead, it’s deeply attuned to working with print houses for color printing, especially four-color offset printing and binding. Whether you are designing stapled pamphlets, folded flyers, or bound books, Print Production takes you from the pre-print design process through the major aspects of the offset- printing process all the way to shipping and delivery issues. Margherita Mariano balances general processes with details of color ink, paper, and binding choices. She defines terms and assumes the reader knows little about printing processes. Furthermore, she’s practical, including schedules, costs, and other logistics typical of any printed project.

The book itself is a joy to hold and flip through. The pages feel substantial. The design elements throughout are both playful and instructional. And the full-color images provide a range of examples including common mistakes like overprinting or color corrections. The cover, which has a gloss coating having an almost 3D effect, uses an eye-catching example of CMYK color bars, which are used to check the density of printed ink, along with registration marks and trim lines, all of which seem like a mistake at first but are creative winks and nods to the tools used in print.

One playful but practical choice is printing part of the chapter about paper by using uncoated stock to demonstrate how an image can look dramatically different depending on the type of paper used—coated or uncoated (glossy versus matte). Another excellent choice is printing some pages using a Pantone color (a type of custom color, in this case a bright orange) to showcase how some colors simply can’t be replicated using the standard CMYK process. These design decisions help readers visualize and feel the differences firsthand, getting a tactile sense of how these elements come into play in printing. Print Production is not just a book about printing—it’s a demonstration of printing in action.

The text is clear and approachable, even as it dives into some complex topics. Mariano covers the ins and outs of pre-press work, from understanding RGB versus CMYK color models to exploring how paper choices affect the final product. Also, the book covers specific details, like how a single sheet or roll of paper is folded and cut to create signatures of multiple pages bound together.

The book includes several asides sprinkled throughout. A history of printed materials or an explanation of how paper is made adds an unexpected but delightful touch, keeping the content from feeling overly technical. Plus, since Mariano authored the book originally in French, there are a couple slips in diction or phrasing. One that goes through the entire book is the use of “banana skins” instead of banana peels for tips about things that could go wrong.

Print Production is a must-read for novices or those new to printing, and for designers, publishers, and other professionals who might use the examples as training or explanations for customers.