A few weeks ago, the last pallet containing letterpress printed copies of Catch-22 left our temporary office. It was pretty uneventful, as all transport should be, but it was exciting for us to see it go. With the second letterpress print run under our belts, we can finally speed things up with 2001: A Space Odyssey—but more on that later. This post is about Catch-22 and its final stages of production (spoiler alert: shipping soon).
After that, we printed the art portfolio illustrations as well, so they would be ready for the Bomber Edition. There are a lot of new features in that specific edition, but we’ll cover them in a video soon where we’ll take a deep dive into its design, right after we do the Monolith Edition video.
Printing Catch-22 was a slow process, mostly because it is a pretty hefty book (624 pages) and because we didn’t want to rush anything. This is especially important since the illustrations were also printed letterpress in two tones, as well as the titles in colour. The important thing is that it turned out great. We couldn’t be happier with it and how well Heidi performed. We’re continuously tweaking and tuning the old beast, and it’s definitely paying off.
The whole print run will be folded and then sewn with the help of our partners who specialise in such tasks, and then we’ll get to binding. In order to be ready for that, we’re making the covers and the cases, so now we’re finally approaching the shipping date.
Packing all those books will be an incredible moment for us because all three editions are so different and unique, and we can’t wait to hear the feedback on their production.
This also means that we will be able to produce 2001: A Space Odyssey much faster, finally lowering the lead time between the announcements and shipping the books. Perhaps we’ll even be able to flip it by the end of the year, thus fulfilling our dream of producing the books ahead of time, so we can ship them right after the announcement. Moving into our renovated space later this year will surely help with that (pictures of work in progress coming soon!).
