It’s one of the biggest and most beautiful jobs we’ve ever printed and bound: 3,000 copies of the art book catalog for the Painting Women exhibition at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Painting Women catalog is a hardcover art book with a matte printed case and a 4-color interior printed on 80-lb. white uncoated paper. Bookmobile loves printing art books—we relished the process of the Painting Women catalog and really enjoyed working with Tarissa Tiberti.
Bookmobile first met Tarissa Tiberti from the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Trade Show in the spring of 2012 in our hometown, Minneapolis. We kept in touch over the next few years and sent her samples of what Bookmobile was up to with art book printing (like Matt Freedman’s Relatively Indolent but Relentless and the American Folk Art Museum’s Foiled). Then in the summer of 2013, we started quoting Painting Women—Tarissa knew this project would need a very tight turn, but she couldn’t sacrifice quality or her budget. Bookmobile could make it all work!
Bookmobile’s graphic design department worked on the interior page design and typesetting. Our graphic design and typesetting department collaborates with great publishers like Graywolf Press and Milkweed Editions, and has the experience needed to produce a well-designed book in a timely matter. In addition, doing the page layout here had another advantage—we could color correct on the printers that would be used for the final run. So from the start, Tarissa saw the exact color of the final book.
Once pages were approved, Painting Women went to the print shop for another round of preflight and hard copy proofs. With Bookmobile, the proofs we send replicate the appearance of the publisher’s final book. The cover and interior proofs are on the stock and from the printer we use for the final run. Interiors are trimmed down to the final size, and covers are laminated.
The deadline for this massive art book print run was even tighter at the end with the winter holidays eating into everyone’s schedule, but Bookmobile made certain the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art had enough books for the opening of Painting Women. We had the remainder of the run ready to ship soon after.
Come see a sample of the book yourself at either the 16th National Museum Publishing Seminar in Boston, June 12-14, or the American Association of University Presses Annual Meeting in New Orleans, June 22-24. Or, head to Las Vegas! Why not?