Imposing a Book

Typically, when you speak of imposing your will on something, it is seen as a bad thing. Not with books.

If you've ever examined a book's structure, you know that the pages aren't glued one on top of the other; they're arranged into signatures (little bundles of pages) that are then bound together. I recently discovered that the process of arranging pages into signatures is called "imposing."

At first, this sounded like an overwhelming and time-consuming process, but nowadays we have the internet, and the internet has programs to impose books. And I have tried one of these programs so you don't have to wonder if they work.

Specifically, I used the older version of BookBinder JS. The newer version had some warnings that there were a few bugs with the program, so I decided not to mess with it. I used a PDF of a book I had already started typesetting for practice.

At first, the buttons on BookBinder were a little overwhelming, but I didn't mess with any of the settings set to "standard." All I did was make sure my paper size was correct and that it was set to "Duplex," so it would print double-sided.

It automatically set my signature size to 7 sheets to equally divide the pages in my document. The output was separate PDFs of the two signatures.

From there, I ran into a little trouble. My printer was set to flip on the long side of the paper, so when I printed the first sheet, the back side was upside-down. I switched it to flip on the short side, and that fixed it. Though a little bit of research later, I now know that the "alternate page rotation" setting would have saved me the trouble. As the name suggests, it alternates the pages so when they're flipped on the long side they're both facing the right way.

All in all, this was a super fun and easy experiment. The results really surprised me with how clean and neat they came out:

If you want to learn more about bookbinding, this video from Four Keys Book Arts is how I figured out about imposing. I recommend checking out his channel as much as I recommend imposing a book.