Royal Art Books is a new client for Bookmobile—and our first tattoo publisher! This past month we’ve printed, bound, and shipped out two titles, Yours truly, Milt Zeis, which is a new hardcover title, and a reprint of the Percy Walters Catalog, another hardcover printing.

The Publisher

Royal Art Books publishes tattoo history and tattoo ephemera books, focused on the Midwest. Based in Evansville, Indiana, Royal Art Books is run by Heather and Clint Vaught (Clint is a tattooer). As their website describes:

(Our) first release was based on a need in the tattoo community to share the wealth of tattoo imagery that came from the flash sheets of Percy Waters. These flash sheets were sold through Professor Waters supply house in the first half of the century and helped solidify what we now consider “American traditional” tattooing.

Clint and Heather sell their books through their website and at tattooing conventions and conferences. New biographies of Midwestern tattooers are in the works!

Besides their website, Royal Art Books has a great Instagram feed (all photos in this Blog post were taken with permission from their feed).

Hardcover Printing at Bookmobile

I worked with Heather on the estimates and production, who said,

We looked all over for a someone to print and bind our books. Our previous printer was very pricey and didn’t offer many options. We wanted many specialty finishes: foil printing on the cover and spine, custom size, end pages, cloth-like cover and more. Bookmobile did a great job fulfilling our order—and at a great price! Their turnaround was excellent. I can’t wait to work on many more projects with them. Thanks Nicole & Bookmobile!

Their first title with us was Yours truly, Milt Zeis, pictured below.

hardcover printing

Yours truly, Milt Zeis was perfect bound and cased in, with 4-color printed end sheets. It’s 12″ x 9″ (odd trim sizes are not a problem at Bookmobile), and the 72 interior pages printed 4-color on 100-lb. uncoated white stock. For a run of 1,000 copies, we could special order the case materials for Heather. She chose an Arrestox-B cloth in slate gray for the case, and a Matte Orange foil stamp for the front cover and spine.

hardcover printing

The Percy Waters Catalog was also perfect bound and cased in, with 4-color printed end sheets. It’s 8″ x 10″ and the 54 interior pages printed 4-color on 100-lb. uncoated white stock. At 1,000 copies, we could also special order the case material for this title—Arrestox-B cloth in chili pepper—which we stamped with a black foil stamp on the front cover and spine.

Why Bookmobile for Hardcover Printing

Our short-run print quality is excellent, our pricing is affordable, and we offer many options.  Customize your hardcovers with fold-out inserts, translucent vellum dust jackets, large-area foil stamps, printed end sheets, and more. Browse our Gallery to see the full breadth of what we offer!

Bookmobile offers PUR binding for a durable bind for coated interior stocks. And with runs of just 25 copies to 2,000 copies, you can print short runs and order reprints as needed—which means no worries about storing inventory or cash flow complications.