If you know the equipment that a press has, give us a sense of it

unnona

If you're part of a press or know folks that are, it would be great to hear what combination of equipment they use, what works for them and what they would do differently.

Did they start with more basic equipment and upgrade at a later stage? What did that look like and what were the considerations?

Sparagmos Press

When we started we began by using the cheap printer we had lying around for printing, a Super Duty 220 stapler, a cutting mat, metal rulers, bone folder, x-acto knife and a hot glue gun. I started printing pocket books four at a time, then when they were printed I'd cut them down to size using a metal ruler and knife (ending up with four books for each print stack). The covers would be printed separate onto card stock. With the Super Duty 220 stapler, you can staple a couple hundred pages at the spine easily. After stapling the spine of the book guts, I'd hammer the staples down into the spine on concrete, then I'd cut the book cover so that it's the proper size to cover the front, back and spine of the book. I would use a metal ruler and bone folder to score the cover and create a spine gap the width of the book guts. Then I would lay a bead of hot glue on the inside of the spine gap and press the guts into the spine. Hard to explain, but easy to do. If you wanna get fancy you can use the metal ruler and knife to cut down any rough edges and then sand them down. I was able to obtain all the tools for the method for under a hundred bucks and printed a few hundred books using this method. Eventually we saved up to buy a used desktop paper cutter and a desktop hot glue binder off of ebay for under $600 total.

vermilion press

Back when vermilion press was really committed to bootlegging the Contagion Press catalog about a year ago, the tools in the print shop were: Ricoh lease to own office b/w laser printer, a brother color laser printer, a 15 inch HFS paper guillotine, and a desktop ez bake oven style of hot glue binding machine. (Sorry I'm forgetting some model details now, but will update them when I get the chance.)
A lot of the work that was done, what was really tricky in the bookmaking process was making covers. Everything was folded by hand using calipers to determine the text block width, and then using a ruler to each fold on the cover would be marked and folded. This hand folding for each book, while really fulfilling, was the roadblock for printing in larger volume and made the process of teaching new book binders difficult because making a cover was a learned practiced skill.
If I return to book binding it was always a dream to make a jig(s) for folding covers to lower the bar to entry for new binders and to save patience. Hard to say if book binding will ever be what vermilion press ever focuses on again, zine layout is highly rewarding, while traditional book arts leans more into the process of making books by hand, many of the tools are accessible and cheap, and the resulting books are more beautiful.

toast

The project that would later come to be known as Contagion Press started out after one of us had already made one book (i.e. one title, at a run of about 100 copies) using other people's equipment, dancing around between 2 or 3 different cities to get the pieces together into the finished object. I had also briefly apprenticed at a real print shop. So we had learned a thing or two. Anyway, we started out with a pile of equipment that we bought off a friend who was trying to move/downsize/drop it in someone's lap and get some money in return. Basically all of it turned out to be mistakes. So did about 80% of what we got while trying to fix those mistakes.

Over the years, we have tried almost everything, and we eventually slid toward a set of equipment that is roughly equivalent to the Open Distro equipment guide at the "bonnot gang member" level. Our considerations for upgrades have been varied (but maybe only variations on a theme?). Trying to get a new release out the night before the big book fair while some cheap table top cutter is literally tearing itself into tiny metal shreds on the table in front of you is a real motivating factor to make some life changes. So is standing in front of the printer waiting for it to jam (which it will reliably do every 1 to 3 pages), then spending a minute or so clearing it, and rinsing and repeating for tens of thousands of pages. Or recruiting your friend into walking in circles around the kitchen table for hours to hand collate fifty thousand sheets of paper. Or trimming a run of a thousand books and finding out part way through the new Riso's registration is so out of whack that thirty percent of the books have pages with text cut off. Or hearing the crunching sound of a paper collator taking about two seconds to turn hours of your hard work into a trip to the recycling bin. Or seeing your friends stay up late melting PVE on your kitchen stove because your cheap binder is putting out decent books only forty percent of the time (and that 40% is the good result, achievable only if you know how to touch it just right and remember to sing to it sweetly before pushing the button each time). Or not being able to sleep at night after staying up printing until 2am because your body is frantically trying to shed all the toxins it's been absorbing and your asthma is coming back for the first time in ten years. I could go on and on...

Ah, innocence. Ah, experience.

Hope that helps.