Considerations before starting
Certain books need a specific construction so that they can do their job. Photo albums are books that need space for all the images you are going to display in that book.
Consequently, we need to think about the strength at the spine and the spacing for each of the signatures.
Here I’m looking at a pamphlet style photo album to overcome these issues.
Coptic Photo Album
I generally make books with a Coptic spine. There is usually enough wriggle room within the spine for the inclusion of any extras you want to add.
I made a number of photo albums earlier in the year, which on the whole I’m pleased with. They were A4 in size, so could hold a number of pictures on each page. But after sticking a few hundred photos in there, I could see there was going to be quite some pressure on the spine — and the fore-edge wasn’t closing as well as it should so I added ties to help keep everything secure.
This made me rethink how I might approach making books that I know are going to hold a lot of additional materials. There are ways of building up a coptic spine so it can do this, but during my trawling of the web, I found an extremely helpful site – papierdesign.de – and loved the simple idea he proposed precisely for this problem: using pamphlet stitch to make a photo album. Genius!
I have unashamedly copied this simple idea and made my own books from this. The beauty of this approach is that the designs for the stitches on the spines can be easily adapted to other patterns. I’d like to look at developing these in the near future.
Marbled Photo Album
My template was important as it told me the space between the signatures, the height of the pages and the additional height of the boards.
The template dictates where to punch the holes in both boards and papers.
I used strong 150gsm papers
If you're interested in photo albums...
I have a number of photo albums with different covers, tropical, marbled and floral.
Or if you want a specific cover use the contact page to drop me a line.
