Free advice (worth what you pay for it...) on binding

[Mark D. Eddy]

If you're going to have a book perfect-bound, make sure your printer is aware of the kind of abuse gaming books usually undergo.

Heck, to make it simple, I'd strongly reccommend against perfect-binding.

I am a professional adhesives chemist. My wife is a librarian. I've seen one too many perfect-bound books in the lab falling apart because of problems with paper, adhesive choice, improper pretreatment of the spine, and/or machine issues. My wife has come home with horror stories about library books that have pages falling out (she has gotten to the point where she refers to "anything-but-perfect" binding) so that I am now *very* careful with my perfect-bound gaming books.

[Clay]

Amen brother.

Even some relatively reputable publishers such as Avon have been plagued by cheap bindings in recent years.  Much thanks to those publishers who have spent the extra dough for either good perfect binding (e.g. the Sorcerer supplements), or paid the extra cost for a sewn binding. One of the reasons I really admire Chaosium (besides the excellent games) is that they don't try to cut corners on printing and binding.