At The Printers

The East German sheet-fed printer is the business.

Plain paper in this end. That's a huge stack of it on that pallet. Each station is a different colour, plus a fixer and machine in the middle to turn the paper to print the other side.
Sideburn! You're up.
CMYK.
This fella loves printing and motorbikes. He gives Sideburn special attention. His desk scans the colours and shows the parameters on the computer screen. Then it's tweaked till it's as lush as possible without being over-saturated.

The colours are super-rich and you can see individual MetalFlake flakes on the Krook Street Racer's tank and every weld on the Metro Racing Outlaw. That's down to the paper and the print quality. This is a 32-page section before folding, binding and trimming. There are three 32-page sections and a cover in every 100-page issue.

I called in at the printers yesterday. I've worked in publishing for 15 or 16 years and I've never seen a magazine I've been involved with being printed. It's a good feeling.
We could easily get Sideburn printed for at least 20% cheaper than we do, but the printers we use now are brilliant, miles better than our original printers (in our experience). And we have to pay for that. But after spending six months on and off, working on the magazine and a lifetime to regret cutting corners we're willing to do that. With this in mind, the photo below made me laugh. G