Freemans and Friesens: The Making of A Year in the Wilderness
Freemans and Friesens: The Making of A Year in the Wilderness
This post has been adapted from the gallery wall exhibit at Milkweed Books, on display from September 2017 through January 2018.
In August 2016, Daniel Slager, Publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions, paddled into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to meet with adventurers and activists Amy and Dave Freeman. Amy and Dave were coming into the end of a year they’d spent in the BWCAW, raising awareness around potential sulfide-ore copper mining on the margins of these precious public lands. The lakeside conversation they shared led directly to A Year in the Wilderness, a memoir of their year in the Boundary Waters and a rousing cry of witness activism published by Milkweed in September 2017.
If Daniel had continued on his journey—following the Freemans’ example, canoeing, portaging, and dogsledding farther north and west—he would have reached the headquarters of Friesens Corporation, a printer in Altona, Manitoba. For the four-color, gorgeously bound book you can now find at any bookstore, we at Milkweed knew Friesens was the perfect partner to print with to make a book of immense writerly and printerly craft, beautiful inside and out.
Milkweed Editions is the proud publisher of ecologically minded nonfiction—most recently A Year in the Wilderness, and including a long backlist of titles such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place, Amy Leach’s Things That Are, and the anthology The Colors of Nature. But Milkweed Editions is also committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, striving to reduce the impact of our operations on the natural environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Many of Milkweed’s books are printed on recycled, 100% postconsumer-waste paper. This was not an option for a book with the kinds of photographs A Year in the Wilderness features, but working with Friesens allowed us to print on Forest Stewardship Council certified sustainably forested paper.
LOADING THE OFFSET PRESS | FRIESENS
Loading a plate onto the offset printing press
Sustainability and efficiency are built into the architecture of the printing plant at Friesens. Printing a four-color book requires careful monitoring of the color balance of the four colors of ink used to print color images: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (the “K” referenced in the industry-wide acronym for the process, CMYK).
ADJUSTING COLOR BALANCE | FRIESENS
Adjusting the color balance under color-correct lighting that simulates daylight
Friesens has invested in high-output efficient offset printers that pipe ink directly into the offset machines. These machines hold metal plates that are used to print the color separations onto each “form,” or group of sixteen pages printed on one massive sheet of paper.
CHECKING THE PRESS | FRIESENS
Checking the sheet-fed offset printing press. Paper is fed into this machine in single sheets that are cut from a massive roll at the other end of the press. Note the pipes of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink that feed directly into the presses.
STACKS OF FORMS | FRIESENS
A “form” is a single sheet containing sixteen pages front-and-back. Here are forms that show printed covers that have been printed on the same sheet as the covers of other titles, an efficient process that saves paper.
This sheet is printed four times—once with each of the four colors—adjusted for color balance, dried, folded and folded and folded again, and then trimmed into a “signature.” Trimmed paper is sucked up into large tubes that run along the ceiling of the building and serve to send all trimmings to a paper baler, which sends bales of cut paper back to Friesens’s paper mill and turns it into recycled paper.
Signatures, or groups of sixteen book pages, are collated—gathered together in the order of the book—and stitched together before being bound to the cover. To help the book best display the Freemans’ beautiful photography, we went with a sewn binding, which allows the book to lay flat when it is open on a table—sewing the signatures together with thread allows for greater page mobility than glue, the less costly but more typical choice for book binding.
COLLATED SIGNATURES | FRIESENS
Collated groups of signatures waiting to be sewn together
STITCHING SIGNATURES | FRIESENS
Detail of an industrial sewing machine stitching together signatures from A Year in the Wilderness
LAMINATING COVERS | FRIESENS
Covers being laminated for maximum durability. A Year in the Wilderness was published with a “printed case” which means that the cover is adhered directly to the book boards rather than being wrapped as a dust jacket.
After the signatures have been sewn together with industrial sewing machines, the cover is adhered to the book boards by affixing the endpapers to the boards as well as to the first and last page of the book’s interior. For A Year in the Wilderness, Milkweed’s Art Director chose a forest green endpaper to complement both the serene photograph on the cover and the peach color of the first interior page—and to position the book’s interior between paper and the color of the great forests of the Boundary Waters.
A YEAR IN THE WILDERNESS SAMPLE SPREADS | MILKWEED EDITIONS
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