I absolutely love the site and visit weekly just to read the updates and everyone's projects. After reading the site and doing some research I have had a few projects bound, I am up to like 8 books on my bookshelf, 4 sitting at Library Binding right now and additional 5 books in my truck I am hoping to ship today. I am hoping to do a few books a month on the books I have decided to keep. (I could start another thread on what I am hoping to do with all my thousands of additional books I realize I won't ever really read.. but another day maybe?) With my shipment today I will have Fantastic Four 200 - 400 bound or being prepped, which I am excited about.
Anyway, so far my process has been to simply collect my books for binding, and send them to LBC. I am hoping to send in a collection of Punisher War Zone (a guilty pleasure, there were some good stories and I enjoy the JRJR, John Buscema and Joe Kubert arcs) I am up above 25 issues. I'd like to do them all in one, so I figured if I did prep work on them, removing the back covers (ads) and the inner ads it would probably thin it out enough to be bound in one smaller volume. I am tradtionally not too worried about gutter loss but there are a lot of 2 page spreads in these books.
Anyway, I was hoping for someone to share in more detail their prep process. Do you remove the staples by hand? With a tool? A knife? Or do you just cut along the spine (like with the paper cutter) and make all the pages free?
When you have all the pages free, how do you bind them together for shipment?
As with most things, I am slightly nervous attempting this the first time. None of these books are priceless, but I only have one of each of them so obviously I don't want to mess them up too badly.
Anyway, your advice is appreciated.
Matt




