Folded, stitched,
coiled and trimmed.

Omega handles bindery for its own work, from a simple letter-fold brochure to a hand-finished pocket folder. Four machines do most of it.

Folder

An MBO B21C with a right-angle unit, continuous feed and an eight-page unit. It runs at up to 35,000 pieces per hour and folds up to four folds per unit — straight, parallel, double parallel, letter, Z fold and more.

What those names mean, since they decide how a piece opens:

• Letter fold — two parallel folds, panels tucking inside one another. The standard rack brochure. The tucked panel is made slightly narrower so it does not buckle.
• Z fold — two folds in opposite directions, so it opens out like an accordion. Every panel is the same width and every panel is visible as it opens.
• Double parallel — folded in half, then in half again the same way. Eight panels from one sheet, and a compact piece that opens big.
• Right angle — a second fold at 90° to the first. That is how a flat sheet becomes a folded booklet or a French fold rather than a longer and longer strip.

Panel widths are not a detail to leave until the folding stage. They are set in prepress, before plates.

Stitcher

A Muller Martini Minuteman saddle stitcher, which collates, stitches and trims books in one pass at up to 7,000 books per hour, across a range of trim sizes.

Saddle stitching is the binding most catalogs, programs and booklets use: folded sheets are nested inside one another over a saddle, stapled through the spine fold and trimmed on three sides. It is the cheapest way to bind a book, it opens close to flat, and it has two rules worth knowing before you lay a job out. Page count must be a multiple of four, because each folded sheet carries four pages. And past a certain thickness the inner sheets push out far enough that trimming takes visible width off their outer margins — which is a prepress adjustment, not a bindery problem, provided somebody thinks of it early.

Coiler

Coil binding is the alternative when a saddle stitch is not what the piece wants, and the color and size of the coil are yours to choose.

The reason to reach for it is mechanical: a coil-bound book lies flat, and folds all the way back on itself. That is why manuals, workbooks, cookbooks and wall calendars get coiled and catalogs do not — anything that has to stay open on a bench while somebody's hands are busy. Coil also takes any page count rather than multiples of four, and handles a thickness that would defeat a stitcher. What it gives up is a printed spine.

GBC plastic comb and Unibind thermal binding are in the bindery too, for the jobs that suit them — comb because pages can be taken out and put back later, thermal because it finishes like a perfect-bound book with a flat printed spine.

Cutter

A computer-programmable 37″ Saber cutter with a microprocessor system. It cuts through more than 1,000 sheets of paper in a single slice, and the microprocessor moves the back gauge from cut to cut without the operator setting each one by hand — which is faster and, more to the point, identical every time. A 32″ ProCut runs alongside it.

Almost every job touches a cutter twice: once to cut the parent sheets down before printing, and once to trim the finished piece to size.

Drilling, padding, sealing, wrapping

• Drilling — three-hole drilling for ring binders, on a Roscoe drill and a Challenge hydraulic drill.
• Padding — notepads padded in-house, to the sheet count you need.
• Wafer sealing — an ALS 9000. A wafer seal is the small clear tab that holds a folded self-mailer shut; the Postal Service requires folded mail to be tabbed, and this is how it gets done. On a mailing it can happen in line with the addressing instead — see direct mail.
• Shrink wrapping — a Clamco, for counting into bundles that arrive as bundles.
• Scoring and perforating — a score is a crease pressed into heavy stock so it folds cleanly instead of cracking the coating along the fold; any cover weight wants one. A perforation is a line of small cuts so a reply card or a coupon tears off straight instead of ragged. Both are platen work, on the Heidelberg Windmill.

Which binding for which job

• Saddle stitch — cheapest, fastest, opens nearly flat. Multiples of four pages. Best up to the point where the folded spine gets too thick to lie down, which depends on the stock as much as the page count.
• Coil — lies dead flat and folds back on itself. Any page count, thick books included. No printable spine.
• GBC comb — pages can be added or removed after binding.
• Unibind — thermal, with a flat printed spine, for something that should look like a book on a shelf.

Not sure which the piece wants? Most of the answer is in what it is for. The products page lists what usually gets bound which way.