Have you ever wondered how books are made?  After all the writing and illustrating is done and the page order is decided, it’s time to actually print the book.  The machines that print the books are called ‘printing presses’.  These huge printing presses have to be set up inside very large rooms.
Most of them are built in Europe – like in Switzerland, for example, then shipped to the country where they will be used where a team of people puts the machine together and gets it ready to start printing.

The printing press in this photo is used to make book covers.
As you can see, it’s quite long.  Each section of the press prints a different color so that by the time the cover comes out – it’s got all the colors on it!  Often several covers are printed on one piece of thick paper. If you look closely, you can see that there are three of the same book cover on the stack sitting there.  Lemon Drop Rain, Over the Top and Swimming in Chocolate are all printed as two covers on one sheet.  When the sheet of covers comes out, it has lots of extra space all around the sides.  So, it will have to be trimmed down to the ‘finished size’ of the book.

This giant machine looks like it has rolls of toilet paper on it!  Well, it’s also a printing press!  Those aren’t actually rolls of toilet paper – they’re rolls of paper that will become the pages of the book.  There isn’t a person in this photo, so it’s hard to see just how big this machine is.  Each of those rolls of paper is as tall as a person!  Notice how thick the steel is… that’s because paper is very heavy… and rolls this big are REALLY, REALLY heavy!!!

Here’s another printing press hard at work.  That paper is moving really fast.  Notice how the people operating the printing press are being careful where they put their hands… I’m sure nobody would want a paper cut from this machine!  Also, notice how the room is well-lit and tidy and kept clean and organized!

After the covers and the pages of the book have been printed, they have to be put together.  This is called ‘binding’.  There are a few ways to bind books using large machines.  They can be stapled, sewn or glued, depending on the size of the book and what kind of cover it will have.  It used to be that when a book was made, it was all made by hand – including the binding process.  There are still people who do that.  They’re called ‘book binders’… but in this case, everything is done using large machines.  The book binder machine you see here is using glue to bind the cover to the pages of the book resulting in a ’soft cover’ or ‘paper cover’ book.  If you have a soft cover book, then it was probably bound this way.  The track of books lined up so perfectly and traveling off into the distance are the finished books.  They’re on a long conveyor belt.  You might wonder why they are traveling so far like that?  Well, they’re actually drying as they move along.  That’s why they’re going so far – so by the time they get to the end – they’ll be dry and ready to be put directly into boxes.  The binding itself is happening back behind all of this… right about where you see the blue box – that’s the part of the machine where the binding is happening.

And that – in a nutshell – is how books are made!

Thanks to Delta Printing, Inc. in Valencia, California for these great photos!