Helpful Tips

This Month's Topic: PUR - The Thin Book Solution
June 2004

When it comes to the design and production of high-visibility pieces such as promotional brochures or annual reports, only the best will do. Beautifully-printed graphics, high-quality paper and elegant coatings make for an impressive appearance on the print side. The next step is to find a binding solution to match. Perfect binding is the natural choice, but it's typically not recommended for projects with heavy ink or coating coverage. If the book is particularly thin - ¼" or less - then perfect binding is even more difficult to use.

Thanks to the advantages of PUR adhesive, crossovers look great (left) even on books as thin as 1/16” (right).

The Thin Book Solution
At Allied Bindery, our solution for extremely thin, high-quality projects is PUR adhesive binding. PUR is the most durable and flexible binding adhesive available. That means it will form a super-strong bond even on projects filled with inks and coatings, and maintain that strength even under extreme usage and temperature fluctuations.

Perhaps the best aspect of PUR is its effectiveness on books and brochures with just a few pages. At Allied Bindery, we can perform PUR binding on books as thin as 1/16" (see images), without spine rounding or waviness. That's due to a combination of Allied's production techniques and the nature of PUR adhesive, which is applied thinly.

Planning Tip
Prepare Crossovers Properly - Crossover images are common on high-quality projects, and can be difficult to align properly when a project is perfect bound. While crossover images should be still be overlapped 1/8" to accommodate for spine grind-off, the flexibility of PUR adhesive means crossovers will look much better regardless of how harshly books are handled.

The Allied Advantage
At Allied Bindery, we look forward to being your complete post press resource. In addition to producing ultra-thin books using high-quality, cost-effective PUR adhesive binding, we perform standard perfect binding (including the ability to bind books two-up), mechanical binding, cutting, folding, saddle stitching, shrink wrapping and more. Give us a call and let us know how we can handle your next project!