Your Bindery
PUR & Hardbound Books

Every book in Denver ends its life as a print job somewhere, and a good number of them end it here. Your Bindery Finishing is the bindery behind the printers — the shop that print houses across the Front Range trust with a finished run when the deadline is real and the stock was expensive. Individual customers find their way here too, carrying one-off projects and family books, and they get the same treatment the trade gets.

What that treatment looks like is mostly questions. Trim size, cover stock, coating, grain direction, hinge clearance, cure time — the unglamorous details that quietly ruin a run when nobody thinks to ask. This crew asks. One customer wrote that she was invited in to watch her job move through cutting, scoring and binding, and left having been taught the process. That is the character of the place: a shop that would rather teach you the spec than bill you for the reprint.

The floor runs deeper than binding alone. Letterpress and foil, die cutting and laser engraving, drilling, numbering, round cornering — fifteen processes in all. But the heart of the shop is the PUR perfect-binding line, and the case-binding bench beside it, turning loose text blocks into books that stay books.

PUR is the strongest glue a paperback spine can carry, and it is this shop’s specialty. It grips coated stocks that defeat conventional perfect binding — UV-coated and aqueous-coated text runs are exactly what it’s for. It holds through heat, and it stays flexible in a Colorado winter, which is more than most spines in this town can say.

Then there is the number that makes printers call from across the state: this is one of the only binderies anywhere that will perfect-bind a text block up to two and a half inches thick. Directories, manuals, catalogs, anthologies — the jobs other shops decline are the jobs this machine was set up for.

Case binding runs alongside — true hardbound books, made in the same shop, checked by the same eyes. And the binder scores covers in-line as they run, or off-line on the letterpress when the job calls for it. Tabs, foldout sheets, covers with folded front and back flaps: all of it binds in.

Most binding disasters are cover disasters, and every one of them is preventable before the press runs. These are the rules of this shop, written plainly so your file arrives ready. Read them once and they will save you a reprint someday.

1. Do not UV-coat the covers.UV coating fights the adhesive at the one seam that matters.
2. Leave the inside of the spine bare.No coating at the spine knockout, plus a ¼″ hinge area to either side.
3. Laminate hot, never cold.Cold lamination will not survive binding; hot-seal lamination is required.
4. Coated text is welcome.UV or aqueous coated text stock is precisely what PUR is for — bring it.
5. Scoring is handled.In-line on the binder or off-line on letterpress — covers arrive ready, or we make them ready.

PUR’s strength has one price, and it is paid in hours: the glue needs 30 to 48 of them to cure before a book can be trimmed and shipped. It is the step deadlines forget. Build the cure into your schedule from the start — or call the shop early and let someone who has planned a thousand runs plan this one with you.

Work moves on a working shop’s clock: weekdays eight to four, weekends by appointment, pickup and deliveries through the alley in back. Send your specs to Luann or call (303) 781-3462, and the job starts with the questions that keep it out of trouble.