The presses never seem to rest for Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. The ninth printing of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book recently arrived at the South Dakota Historical Society Press warehouse, bringing the total number of copies in print to over 165,000. Our good friends to the north at Friesens Corp. sent us photographs of the bestseller on their production lines. It’s like our very own episode of How It’s Made!
The Pioneer Girl Project
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl
“The presses never seem to rest…”
As the owner of a small offset printing company, this makes my heart sing!! Loved the pictures, although a couple of the actual running on the press would have been awesome. Was it ran on an offset press, digital offset, or a web? If it was offset, wow! How would you prevent offsetting in that first picture? That’s a BIG stack of paper! Do y’all have a collator? (if not, then I bow to the master that can collate all that by hand!) Ahhh… so many questions! LOL
Thank you for your questions, Heather!
We went back to Erin Enns, our customer service representative at Friesens, to help us with an answer. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is printed on a sheet-fed press, and according to Erin, “The key to helping prevent offsetting: drying time! Make sure you allow enough time between printing and folding/binding so that the ink can dry adequately. And we do indeed have a collator as well (it can handle 18 sections, and Pioneer Girl is 15) so no hand-collating for us! Oh my goodness, I can’t even imagine how long that would take.”
Learn more on Friesen’s process by watching their “How a Book is Made” video.
Awesome! Thank you!
That is TOO cool! “How Its Made” is one of my favorite TV shows (right up there with LHOTP) and I think Laura would get a big kick out of all this technology and seeing her life and her dreams of publication come true. You guys have done a outstanding job with this project and I thank you for sharing it with us!
Always love seeing the book printing process. Congratulations on the newest run of PG!
A wonderful accomplishment. It is a beautiful book!
Congratulations on the 9th printing! And thanks for the photos! I had never seen those parts of the process.
Deb Watley
Congratulations. This was so cool. I just loved seeing how pioneer girl was made. I received my copy after the 3 or 4 printing. I will always cherish it. I even protect it. I love it that much. The cover is simply beautiful and the quality of the paper is amazing.
Thanks for posting these pictures. I love watching how things are made. I blame it on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I loved when they would show how crayons were made, and stuff like that!
I got a copy of Pioneer Girl for Christmas and I love it!