Book News: TMAoC Back in Stock with New Binding!

The fourth printing of The Mad Art of Caricature! arrived today and is back in stock!

The book has a ton of extremely positive reviews on Amazon (88 as of this post), but there has been one complaint made by a just a few people…apparently on some copies the binding has come loose and pages have fallen out. I’ve only had a handful of complaints about it out of many thousands sold, so I suspect the problem only affects some copies where perhaps the glue was thin or some other factor weakened the binding on part of the run. That’s not unheard of… in the original print run a small number of copies had duplicated pages out of order (!!).

The book is perfect bound and glued, not stitched. I went with glue only simply for economic reasons. I’d have had to charge more for a stitch-bound book, and $24.95 seemed like a lot for a paperback already. The type of glued binding was called ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) hotmelt, and is a very standard type of perfect binding.

After I got those few complaints I did some additional research and found one of the shortcomings of EVA hotmelt is that it doesn’t do as well with glossy, coated stock, and that’s just what is in my book. It also is not very flexible and opening up the book to lay flat will certainly cause the pages to loosen and eventually fall out.

I’m happy to say this new printing uses a different type of glued binding called polyurethane reactive (PUR) gluing. It’s still not stitched, but the PUR binding offers many significant advantages over EVA. First, it bonds strongly to coated stock like that in TMAoC. It has a 40-60% stronger adhesion, while using less glue overall. PUR glue is considerably more flexible than standard EVA hotmelts, making it possible to open the book fully to lie flat and allow for hands-free reading… this one I have a hard time believing but that’s what they say. It also doesn’t “wrinkle” or distort the spine as much. Of course, it’s more expensive. It’s still cheaper than stitching, so the book stays the same price.

In other book news, there is now a Canadian price of $27.95CAN on the book’s UPC box. This is because it is likely the craft store chain Micheal’s will start carrying the book, and they require a marked Canadian price. For simplicities sake, any Canadian buyers who gets the book directly from me will still pay the US price converted rather than the Canadian price, which is (right now) a better deal anyway. Plus I sign it for you (big deal, I know).