A Production Story: How Hawthorne Books Got Its Double Scored Flaps
More than meets the eye...
Kate’s husband, Ed, often complained about the flaps on our original paperback books. He said that he couldn’t use them as bookmarks because they pulled out of the text and with the flap inserted in the book it wouldn’t lay flat. He was right.
Fast forward to the Netherlands. I had friends living there, and planned to visit them. In my past travels, I have been strictly a Lonely Planet girl, and have bought and used and marked up many of them, so I headed off to Powell’s to buy their Amsterdam guide. While I was at the bookstore, I discovered another guide book that I had to have as well, the DK Eyewitness.
Why? Because I am a sucker for four color, and as guide books go, this one was luxurious, the museum guides in particular were great, and one of the things I never miss when visiting a city are the art museums. As usual, I left the bookstore with more books than I had intended. Off I go to Amsterdam with two guides.
It wasn’t long before I noticed that the Eyewitness guide had double scored flaps instead of single scored flaps that form a spine allowing the reader to use each front and back flap as a placeholder that doesn’t pull out of the text and allows the book to lay flat. Eureka! We could do that with our books and I could get Ed off our backs. What I mean to say here is that we could offer bookmarks that actually work to our readers.
Following my vacation, I showed Kate my copy of the Eyewitness book and asked, “Why don’t we do this too?” Great minds and all that and Kate agreed. Did I feel bad appropriating the format from Eyewitness? Not at all. (We can’t get sued for that, can we?) Insinuations aside, since Kate and I launched our original paperbacks with flaps, we noticed a number of like formatted books in the marketplace. Coincidence? You be the judge. At any rate, Hawthorne Books added a second score to their flaps and never looked back. Check your local bookstore and you will find that our books are the only original paperbacks so formatted. So far.
Our books are double scored...
You fold along the second score...
The end result.
3 Responses to “A Production Story: How Hawthorne Books Got Its Double Scored Flaps”
Ken Hughes says:
April 20, 2010 at 7:00 am
Double Scored Flaps for All!
Liz Crain says:
April 27, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Aye aye! A thing of beauty.