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| Outside Acme Bookbinders in Charlestown, MA |
HEY BLOGGERS!
This week the Visual Arts Colloquium class took a visit to Charlestown to visit Acme Bookbinding! Acme is one of the oldest and largest bookbinders in New England. They're also in Guinness Book Of World Records for binding the largest book—which is 5 feet tall and 80 inches wide. To hold this book together, they used screw posts. Our tour guide, Pete, was very humorous and we thank him for taking time out of his day to show us around.
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| Pete, our tour guide, shows the “largest book in the world” to the students. He explains the printing and binding process that went into crafting it. |
We learned that Acme was formally known as J. G. Roberts, and was founded in 1821. Pete opened the tour with a story of how the president of Acme, Paul Parisi, quit his job and founded Acme on the same day his son John Parisi was born, which is how they remember the company's age. Acme is a family company, so his son John also works there too, as head of manufacturing. As Pete took us around Acme, we were able to see some new equipment used to bind books, as well as some older ones. It was cool—they use a lot of unique materials for their books, such as leather and goat skin (sorry to all the animal lovers).
Acme Bookbinding provides edition binding, library binding, textbook rebinding and other products. They use glue and sewing to bind books together, and when the machines finish sewing, or the glue is dried, the books go through a machine with a double sided blade, that is placed at an angle and it cuts and trims the book to the desired size. It was pretty amazing to watch the machines work. One of the fancier machines was the Hp indigo press 5500. One of our classmates (HALI) sketched up a picture of it for us. Their projects can take up to one weekend to a couple of weeks. Their motto is "never turn anything down" which may be the reason why they are New England’s favorite! :)
Acme Bookbinding in Boston was an interesting place to visit. The building seemed small to me at first when i walked in but then it grew across two other buildings from side to side and had an entire underground workplace. This was a pleasant surprise. Our tour guide was king and incredibly informative. My favorite part of the trip was being downstairs and watching the many machines as they created the books. Something new that i learned out of the experience is that Acme holds the record for the largest book ever made.
ReplyDeleteAcme Bookbinding was cool and it taught me a lot about making book bindings. I never thought about how to they make book bindings or how much time it took to put in. Although i loved watching the machines move, I found it really interesting when our tour guide told us about how they make the edges of the book pages gold.
ReplyDeleteVisiting Acme was really interesting. When we arrived in the Curry van, I thought the building was small, but little did I know it was huge! Walking on the lowest level of the building, there was a machine that glued the books together. As I walked by the machine, I noticed a book off to the side titled, Concord Academy. I thought that was interesting because I had gone to school there when I was younger!
ReplyDeleteI was quite suprised to find how much of the plant was actually hiding. What I mean is, when you see the building from the outside it seems rather small. Then once you enter, there's so much inside it's unbelievable. My favorite part was how much detail they put into some of their books. The higher end ones that range from $300 a book. They have people doing work by hand creating the masterpiece. Some of their work is just beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI thought ACME was a very interesting class trip, you go in there thinking how interesting could a book binding place be? well it turned out to be very interesting you never realy think about how much work it takes to make a book until you go to a book binding workshop and see a whole bunch of machines gluing, stamping, embosing, cutting etc. all just to make 1 book.
ReplyDeleteAcme was very interging, first glance you like " why is our teacher taking us to this sketchy place" but when you open the door and walk through and down the stairs you willl see why. Acme is a huge book binding company where in fact they have just SO many book binding machines. Its CRAZY! I Would have to say my favorite thing we saw there was the HUGE book that was at least like 4 feet tall. Its such a cool book and the color is so specific and clear and so bright! Acme was a cool place to visit.
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