We were super excited to print a custom book for the band The Flaming Lips earlier this month, King’s Mouth. If you’re familiar with the band, you know that they are extremely imaginative: live shows can feature giant rabbits, UFOs, and inflatable human hamster balls. So it’s no surprise the book is quite wild: the subtitle is Immersive Head Trip Fantasy Experience, and the book is full of psychedelic artwork.
King’s Mouth was first an art installation by the band’s frontman Wayne Coyne at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum in 2015. It was one of the most popular attractions in the museum’s history! It’s also been installed at Coyne’s gallery space The Womb in Oklahoma City.
The book is the mythic tale of how the King’s Mouth of the installation came to be, and each page of text faces a vivid illustration.
The Hardcover Printing
I was contacted for the hardcover printing through the Bookmobile website by George Salisbury. Salisbury has his own production studio and he works with The Flaming Lips and other clients for film and video direction and graphic design.
King’s Mouth is 8-1/4″ x 10″ and 28 pages. The interior printed 4-color on 100-lb. gloss coated-white. We PUR bound and cased it in, with a Rainbow Antique pearl gray case and endsheets, with a silver foil stamp on the spine. At 28 pages, the spine was too small for headbands. The dust jacket printed 4-color on 100-lb. gloss C2S with gloss lamination.
Why Bookmobile to Print a Custom Book?
Our short-run print quality is excellent, our pricing is affordable, and we offer many options. Customize your paperbacks with a square trim size, translucent vellum insert, foil stamping on a paperback cover, and more. Browse our Gallery to see the full breadth of what we offer!
Bookmobile can perfect-bind as few as 16 pages and we offer PUR binding for a durable bind for coated interior stocks. And with a minimum run quantity of just 25 copies, artists can print short runs and order reprints as needed—which means no worries about storing inventory or cash flow complications.