Photobooks have recently become a very popular product for both amateur and professional photographers. They look slick and professional, are a great way to showcase a set of photographs, are generally good value for money, and they make a great gift. Unfortunately they are often printed on inferior paper which tears easily or doesn’t go the distance, and the software used to create them online can be notoriously unreliable and often doesn’t provide for much creative input.

This has been on my mind for some time, hence I’ve been plotting and planning what I think is a pretty special idea.

Do you want a photobook that looks exactly like everyone else’s? Or would you prefer a unique, handmade, photobook made especially for you?

I’m so excited to finally be sharing this with you: yippee!

Meet my very first katbook…

katbooks are designed to last a lifetime and are made with archival quality, acid free materials. Covers are made from fine quality museum board or mat board with custom designed and handprinted titles.  Paper is fine quality medium weight (200-250gsm) textured paper such as Canson Mi-Teintes or Daler Rowney.  Photographs are printed at a professional lab and affixed by hand to each page. 

The katbook pictured is saddle stitched for maximum durability and features unbleached cotton ties and a protective flap. It measures 8 x 8 inches and includes seven 5 x 7 photographs, eight 4 x 6 photographs and six wallet sized photographs.

My plan is to design a small range of katbook styles to be available to my photography clients. There will be a variety of cover and paper colours available for each style so clients will be able to choose a look to suit their taste, while leaving the hard stuff to me.

I would also like to market katbooks to professional portrait photographers as an additional product/service they can provide their clients.  If you’re interested in this service, I can create a unique katbook style just for your business, which you can use that each time you place an order, and you need only provide me with your prints and photobook layout. Alternately, you could choose from the same selection of books I offer my clients. If you’re a professional photographer in Australia and you like the sound of this, please let me know.  My email is kat.words at gmail dot com.

Further to this, I’m considering the possibility of providing a photobook service for anyone who wants their own photographs to be made into a katbook. It will probably take me some time before I’ve figured out the ins and outs of how to do this, so if you have any suggestions or feedback on this idea, I would love to hear it.  

Bookbinding is an age old craft. Handmade books are beautiful and unique, but can also be extremely time intensive to make, and therefore expensive, inaccessible and underappreciated.  I have always loved books and began learning the craft of bookbinding in my final year of highschool. For a short time in my early 20s, I worked as a freelance binder for artists, providing custom made sketchbooks, portfolio boxes and presentation solutions.

It was something I loved very much, but after a time I found that it didn’t provide me with enough mental stimulation to become a full time career, so I gave it up. Ever since, it’s only been an occasional hobby, mostly driven by my desperation to do something with the boxes of printed photographs in my cupboards, and my artist father, who has me make him a huge, thick guardbook (sort of like an expandable album, but saddle stitched) every so often to store his drawings in.

I’m thrilled to be making books again, and combining my biggest love, photography, with a skill I’ve known for nearly half my life. It’s almost as if it’s been lying dormant, just waiting for me to stumble upon this idea.

Feedback on this post would be appreciated very much.