stapling!

[Korinna]

For those of you who have experience making bigger zines... how many pages can you still comfortably staple? Would a 120 page quarter sized zine be plausible? (that would be 30 pieces of paper together stapled) I don't really want to waste a bunch of paper experimenting.

thanks :)

[ashlee swanson]

i made a larger zine once and what i had to do was staple it in smaller sections and then run a strip of glue down the middles and put them together. and i had to trim the edges of the inner sections so they didn't come to a point and look funny. it was a lot of work, but turned out really good.

it's something to think about, if you're willing to put a decent amount of time into it.

[NicoleIntrovert]

For something that large, i would look into your perfect binding options. A large zine like that would not only be awkward to staple (and most of those long arms may only go 20 pages), but awkward to hold and read.

I was glad when Dreamwhip went to a perfect binding because it was getting rather odd to hold and rubber bands were decaying for the bindings.

[Harley R. Pageot]

I recently did a 72-page half-page zine (18 sheets of paper) and struggled to staple. There are heavy duty staplers and there are long-arm staplers but I haven't seen anything that is both. I wound up using extra-strength staples in the long-arm stapler but even still I wound up spending a lot of time removing staples that didn't go all the way through and restapling. And the palm of my right hand was in tremendous pain by the time I finished due to the amount of force I had to slam down on the stapler.

[Korinna]

what is perfect binding?

NicoleIntrovert said:

For something that large, i would look into your perfect binding options. A large zine like that would not only be awkward to staple (and most of those long arms may only go 20 pages), but awkward to hold and read.

I was glad when Dreamwhip went to a perfect binding because it was getting rather odd to hold and rubber bands were decaying for the bindings.

[Erica S.]

Like a paperback book, with a spine. You can do it at Lulu, or at some copy shops. But I'd probably think about making it half-size or half-legal (and thus having fewer pages to staple through) before using perfect binding because it will really up your costs. (Also, I'm very excited to read this!)

Korinna said:

what is perfect binding?

NicoleIntrovert said:

For something that large, i would look into your perfect binding options. A large zine like that would not only be awkward to staple (and most of those long arms may only go 20 pages), but awkward to hold and read.

I was glad when Dreamwhip went to a perfect binding because it was getting rather odd to hold and rubber bands were decaying for the bindings.

[Korinna]

ah! so frusterating. I would probably switch to half size but I've already layed out more than 70 pages! and I feel like only half of my stories are told, and I was going to try to squeeze them into 40 more pages to make stapling possible but I don't want to end up leaving stuff out or editing stuff down for the sole purpose of being able to use a STAPLER. I'm also really not into making fancy bindings, they make me really frusterated and i have endless respect for those who do it... but i'm just not one of those crafty people. but ill figure something out... its gonna work... its gonna work!

ok... at work i just ripped 30 pieces of paper and stapled them... confirmed it is not a sufficiant way to bind a zine... but i figured it out. i'm just going to make two zines... part 1 and 2. way to go korinna... i'm a problem solving genius.