Are color images in nice books considered archival? How are they printed

November 16, 2020 8:10 AM

I'm an artist and aware that for digital art prints, giclee printing is recommended as being most archival. This involves an inkjet printer and pigment inks rather than dyes. I'm wondering how this relates to the printing process for nice books. Do they use dyes or pigments, or is there some completely different process I don't understand? If not giclee, how archival is color generally considered?

I'm wondering this because I'm getting into book arts, where there's a big emphasis on all materials being archival, and not sure what kind of printed material would be reasonable to include or what kind of printer would be good to use.

posted by lgyre to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Books are printed using inks (generally a mix of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, although for specific results, other inks can be used), on sheet-fed or roll-fed printing presses. The ink is very thick and generally is transferred from a roller onto a printing plate, which then transfers the image to the paper. This video shows the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noxHRAioaVQ

The printed pages often get an additional clear coat (it can be gloss or matte) to provide some protection. I have no idea how long the stuff is meant to last, as all the stuff I work on is catalogs and brochures that are only meant to last short time.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:23 AM on November 16, 2020

"Offset printing" is the search term that will give you all the information you need. General-purpose color offset is four-color process (the CMYK mentioned above, K for black), but for high-end art books sometimes more colors can be used to increase the gamut. (That is, there are some colors we can see that can't be acheived by mixing those 4 colors, but can be printed if you throw in green and orange ink: hexachrome.)

A lot of the finished look depends on the paper as well: how white, how glossy, etc. The paper is the biggest factor in archival quality, too. Cheap paper is acidic and will eventually decompose on its own (think of the 60+ year old mass market paperbacks you pick up and the corners of the pages are flaking off). Archival paper doesn't do that, but it costs significantly more.
posted by rikschell at 10:42 AM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It is my understanding that inks used in offset litho printing are all pigment-based. Also in high quality offset printing, instead of drying, the ink is set onto the paper with heat or cured with UV or electron beam energy, greatly increasing the longevity of the print. Overall, I’d trust a quality offset litho print to last much longer than a giclee print.
posted by zsazsa at 11:15 AM on November 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

Perhaps an element is that books are mostly closed, the prints not exposed to light. Whereas giclee prints are meant to be framed and mounted on a wall, for the most part. Ditto rikschell that the quality of the paper is also of great importance. To a lesser extent, the kind of binding will affect the life of a book, as well: that is, sewn rather than glued.
posted by tmdonahue at 12:05 PM on November 16, 2020

In the context of book arts if you're talking about artist's books many of the books will be doing some kind of letterpress printing with rubber based ink onto some kind of cotton paper. The books' pages will be sewn togther and then the book will be glued into the cover with PVA. These processes for the most part are very long lasting.

You might want to check out CBAA for more information about the bookarts world.

rikschell has it right about talking about the paper. It doesn't matter how archival your ink is if your paper will crumble after 60 years.
posted by gregr at 12:09 PM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]