Cookbooks

Made from Scrap

If you’re digitally challenged or a crafting enthusiast, consider a scrapbook-style cookbook. Using a scrapbook from any craft or hobby store – or a screw-post book from Igloo Letterpress in Worthington, starting at $35 – you can print or handwrite your recipes and illustrate them with photographs, or embellish them with stickers and colorful paper.

A big plus of going this route is you don’t have to use a computer program for layout, which could be confusing if you don’t already know how to use one. A major drawback, however, is that the project will be time-consuming – especially if you plan to make multiple books.

With just a little time at the computer typing up your recipes in Microsoft Word on a standard 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper, you open up a wealth of options for how to present your finished product.

Gourmet Plate

Once you have your recipes typed and laid out on the page, consider taking them to a local print shop such as a FedEx Office or, even better, a local printer such as The Monk’s Copy Shop in Worthington or downtown Columbus. Copy shops use laser printing, which doesn’t smear when it gets wet, as ink-jet printing from a home printer does.

For a single 8.5” x 11” 50-page cookbook with a color cover with clear vinyl and coil binding, Monk’s quoted $44.48. For printing alone, the charge is $15.01.

If you want to upgrade from a spiralbound book, cart your printed pages over to Igloo and have owner Allison

Chapman help you select from her three styles of bound books. Igloo offers “perfect bound” books in hard or soft cover, screw-post books, and elastic bound books.

“Often, when people come here, they’re either looking for an heirloom-quality piece they can make a copy of for every sibling and grandchild, or they’re looking for something that can get sauce on it in the kitchen,” Chapman says. “We try to balance that depending on what people are looking for.”

Both the perfect bound books (glued binding) and the screw-post books allow for double-sided printing, which means easy layout and printing. The elastic bound book is a little more complex in its printing layout, though it can be assembled much more quickly.

“If you think about a folded sheet of paper, page 1 and page 4 are on the same sheet,” Chapman explains. “Then if you think about nesting (the pages), it’s actually page 1 and page 16. It does get complicated for folks who are just doing it in … Microsoft Word or something.”

Chapman says to allow 10 days for Igloo to craft book covers.

For a deluxe, hard-bound tome, consider west Columbus-based Beck & Orr. The 124-year-old book-binding operation is in the business of binding small batches of books in prices starting around $50-75 each (volume discounts may apply depending on the number of identical copies ordered).

“We do it by hand,” says Beck & Orr’s longtime owner, Ron Bowman. “We have machines, but we don’t have anything we can use to mass-produce books.”

Though known for its thesis-binding, the company has produced family cookbooks in the past. Staffers work with pro- fessional printers for the inside material and color dust jackets. The hard-bound copies have sewn binding and cloth or leather covers, which can be imprinted with foil or topped with a photograph, if desired. Beck & Orr aims for a quality product that will last for generations.

“Most books today are covered in paper. I don’t even mess with that stuff,” Bowman says.

Turnaround for a small run of books is usually a few weeks.

Shake and Bake

Crunched for time or feel overwhelmed? Plug your typed recipes into an online cookbook creator such as www.cookbookpublishers. com, which offers a variety of templates for a professionally-designed look without all the work. You can even send in a packet of recipes and have Cookbook Publishers’ staff type them up.

The company offers comb binding, printed binding and spiral binding. Prices start around $4.40 each for a run of 100 books with as many as 150 recipes; the site’s target market is those using cookbooks for fundraising efforts, so 100 is the minimum order. At Tastebook.com, you can complement your family recipes with some from the site’s vast collection of recipes available for purchase and put them both into a binder-style cookbook that allows for the removal and reorganization of pages at will. Tastebooks start at $39.95 each and come with 99 recipe credits.

No matter the style, your volume of hand-selected recipes is sure to be appreciated by those who unwrap it – even if it takes a few years for the cookbook’s true value to show itself.

“They thought it was great,” Baillieul says of her end product. “I’m not sure that anyone has actually used it because they all have recipes that they’ve written down elsewhere, but a lot of our recipes are shoved in a box written in a sidebar or something. I think that eventually, someone will appreciate that it’s in a digital format.” cs

Lisa Aurand is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.

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From complete, chef-made dinners to glamorous party hors d’oeuvres, you’ll find the festive best in our NEW holiday menu at Market District.com/Catering. Or simply call or visit our Caterers to place your order.