Book of the Dead - The Definitive Evil Dead Website

The book was written & compiled over the month of September 2019. Of 520 photos used through the book, virtually all were taken while each project was in progress over the last twenty-four years, although there were fourteen new photos taken for this book, where necessary originals were unavailable. Four of the source photos were 35mm negative scans, with the remaining 516 all being digital photos. Here is the book's foreword;

This book chronicles over twenty-four years of personal Evil Dead related projects; that is projects where physical items were created and photos taken along the way, along with a catalogue of my personal Evil Dead collection to date.

Detailing over sixty projects; from items made in art class at school in 1995, running EvilDeadChainsaws.com over ten years, travelling to The Evil Dead & Evil Dead II filming locations in 2012, making fanfilms, various models and replica items such as the cabin clock, Kandarian Dagger, lantern, and a cabin scale model, as well as authoring various Evil Dead related DVDs, Blu-rays & VHS preservation projects.

This self-published book has been assembled, printed & bound personally, and is limited to a small number of copies. It contains nearly 600 photos over 200 pages. It’s largely presented in chronological order, although as a number of projects overlapped, they’re separated out to keep things simple for the reader.

This is the first edition, completed October 17, 2019. It may be updated and re-published in the future.

Of the twenty-five books made, one was given away as the BookOfTheDead.ws 10th Anniversary October 2019 competition prize, a further eight were given away free to friends, fifteen were sold (for £34.99 each + S&H), and the last one was my own personal copy. Each book cost around £20 in materials and laser printing costs (at least in theory), so the fifteen books that were sold offset some of the total cost of the ten free books & postage, leaving no profit at the end.

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Having never bound a book before myself, and the price of professional book printing & binding being prohibitively expensive, I learned the basics from a few YouTube tutorial videos. Once I'd made two prototype/test books, along with some modifications to the tutorial processes, I was able to complete two books a week from mid-October onwards (with a break over Christmas). My weeks were structured, so Monday evening I would laser-print four sets of book pages (made up of fifty double-sided A4 sheets each, or 400 sides of A4, each arranged in to batches of four sheets making sixteen book pages/sides in the finished book). Tuesday I would bind the first book (folding all fifty pages in half, pressing them in the book press for an hour, unfolding them and punching eight holes down the spine of each batch of four pages, then sewing each batch of four pages to the last, to get a bound 'text block', which was then put back into the book press, given two coats of PVA glue down the seam and left to dry. That whole process took around 3-1/2 hours). The Wednesday evening, I glued the black front & back inside covers to the text block, then when dry, I glued a piece of card around the spine for extra strength. The Thursday evening I could take the previous text block out of the press, and start binding the next one over that evening and Friday evening. Not working on it over the weekend, the following Monday I would have two completed text blocks and I'd glue the decorative black ribbon tabs at either end of the spines, and once I had a pile of these built up after a few weeks, six or so, I'd then glue the all the text blocks to each of their hardback covers over one evening. The covers themselves were printed out on sticky-backed canvas textured vinyl which was stuck to front, back & spine pre-cut sections of 3mm smooth fibreboard. This was then glued to the completed text block. As each little batch was done, I'd then mail them out.

The majority of the cost was the printer cartridges. A complete set of unbranded high yield toner cartridges was around £110, which would print roughly 750 sides per cartridge set, or 7.5 books (£14.26 per book, although they were sold as printing around 2500 sheets, not even close!). While that seems expensive, using official branded HP cartridges would have been far more expensive at around £320 per set at around the same page yield, with each book costing a huge £43 just to print!

Using compatible rather than branded cartridges did turn into a real headache in terms of reliability. I went though eight sets of high yield toner cartridges for my HP Colour LaserJet Pro M254dw, but five of those sets were returned & refunded by Amazon because of printing issues, some immediately and some a while after I started using them. That was down to either patchy printing or some colour cartridges failing or not working at all. I started with the HP branded set that came with the printer which worked perfectly, then switched to the compatible Cool Toner brand, then to Arcon brand, and both seemed to be equally unreliable, but it was the only way to make the project work financially. As I was able to use most of the returned cartridges at least partially before problems started, I still came out ahead in the cost. Along with the final books, the tests and many dodgy prints I went though seven 250 sheet packs of colour copy A4 Paper (1750 sheets), so around 400 sheets were wasted/unusable for one reason or another. Below you can see a gallery of in-progress photos taken during the production run. You can click to enlarge each photo.

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Bookbinding is an extremely laborious & time consuming process, which needs to be methodically worked though at each stage. It's not something that lends itself to being rushed, or done in a slap-dash fashion, otherwise the end result really suffers both in terms of the quality, and having an item which will hold together with regular use. Knowing what I know now, if I do a sequel or updated version of this book in a decade or so, I'd probably do less copies, maybe ten or so.