Printing Postcard Pads

November 5, 2009 12:19 PM

I'm looking for the best place to find 4x6 postcards glued into a pad of like 50 or 100. Kind of like a memo pad only with thicker cardstock.

None of the standard printing places online like Vistaprint have any idea what I'm talking about. But I'm hoping someone out there does. The cheaper the better, of course.

posted by banished to media & arts (6 answers total)

Did you mean watercolor paper postcards? Here and at any large online retail art supply.
posted by Muirwylde at 12:54 PM on November 5, 2009

Sorry I guess I should have been more specific. I want to get them custom printed. So they wouldn't be things you write on.
posted by banished at 1:06 PM on November 5, 2009

You can just do this yourself--I worked in a print shop when I was in high school, and there's no magic to it--you just assemble the pad and paint it with glue. I can't remember the name of the glue, but googling should find it for you. That way, you can buy the cards and save a lot of money.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 1:07 PM on November 5, 2009

Yeah, any print shop worth their salt will be able do it for you. All it really takes is clamping the paper/cardstock together near the edge, then painting some padding glue on the edge. Let it dry for a couple of hours, and you're set.

Kinko's used to do this (at 50 cents per pad), but no idea if that's still the case.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 1:21 PM on November 5, 2009

Several years ago we went to Kinko's (Now FedEx Office) and had this done. Well, we actually did a memo pad with 50 sheets of paper and a cardboard backing. I printed the sample on one sheet of paper, they ran that through their copy machine to make 50 copies, added the cardboard backing, then put the glue on it.

In my case, they also cut those pages into fourths, making the memo pads about 4X5.5 inches. I only mention this in case someone else is reading this - we used it as a holiday gift for all the kids in my daughter's class at school - personalized memo pads. Cost about 25 cents each.

But I am 99.999999999% sure they can do the same thing with a stack of card stock. If you use the full-page size of card stock, they can cut it; if you use a stack of pre-cut cards, I bet they can run those through their copy machine.
posted by CathyG at 1:23 PM on November 5, 2009

Harking back centuries to my time working in print.... yeah you need a real printer, not a ZippyQuickInstaPrinter. Look up "Print Shops" in your phone book or online. You want the kind that might not even have a retail front.

As the Admiral says, it's not magic: you just clamp it together tightly near the edge and paint it with padding glue, which is almost exactly like rubber cement. You can even do it with some sort of bookbinding recipe, flour and water, but that won't have as much elastic "give" when you flip through pages.

Warning: card stock doesn't pad well, because it's not flexible enough, so inside pages will become dislodged quite easily. But if you're only pulling them off the top and not digging inside often, you should be fine.
posted by rokusan at 1:48 PM on November 5, 2009