Perfect binding uses a hot melt glue to hold the pages to the spine. Text sections are folded with perforations at the spine which allows the glue to seep into the pages giving a very strong bind.
Perfect binding gives a very neat, professional finish. It is suitable for publications of around 48 pages or over as the spine needs to be of a minimum thickness to glue into. This makes it especially suitable for magazines and booklets with more pages, corporate brochures and product catalogues.
How to set up your artwork
[See our artwork guideline checklist for full details]
All the usual print ready PDF settings apply, but with perfect binding there’s a few other points to consider. The first is the spine; the number of pages in the publication, combined with the weight of those pages, will give us the thickness of the book. This will enable you to set your artwork up with the correct thickness of spine. Our PDF guide has a handy table to work this out. We prefer having the covers of perfect bound books supplied as “spreads”, with the spine in place.
We do not recommend having any text printed on the spine if it is below 5mm. The cover is also creased, 6mm away from the spine, which allows the cover to open without breaking the glue. This is known as the hinge, and we also don’t recommend having any important information in this area.