What did the job entail?
Publishing house First Light was launched in 2010 purely to produce 100 copies of the book, although the run has now been extended to 1,000 copies, each one signed by the band. XY Digital helped to organise production of the book and have a terrabyte of data gathered from the reprographic stage. It took 600 hours to convert 51 35mm shots into 660MB files at 4700% times the original size and a consultant was drawn in to identity corrections and retouching needed on specific photographs.
The book stands at 9.1m tall and each copy weighs 25kg, using nearly 1kg of HD ink. The cover and back page are customisable to the buyer’s national flag. The back page, or signature page, was signed by members of KISS and nine different brasses were used to create the silver and gold decoration. Each page was 100% covered in ink, bulking the 200gsm pages used up to 300gsm.
How was it produced?
XY DIgital contacted the only printer they knew who could handle the job, EBS group in Verona, who produced the pioneer giant book of Helmut Newton's works in 1999. Bespoke profiles were created for each page using 40% density Aviva inks with GMG software on an Epson 9900 to convert RGB to CMYK for proofs.
Two KBA Rapida 162 presses worked for 196 hours over 14 days, using 420 aluminium plates. It took two weeks and 20m of thread to hand sew each book. Faux leather was applied to the wood cover board over a layer of foam and screenprinted. Each sheet needed its own pallet for storage as they were not stackable, covering 73sqm per book.
What challenges were overcome?
The colossal size of the book meant that the pages had to be hand stitched to the wood cover board to ensure that they did not come away from the spine. First Light wanted to use never-before-seen images, some very grainy due to age and lighting, which had to be colour corrected.
Each page had to be flown between KISS in Los Angeles, EBS in Verona and London-based XY Digital so that the band members could approve every part of the book. Eric Ladd of XY Digital said that a lot of his work on the book involved Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the comments made by the band for correction.
KISS' archive of photographs is only available in the United States so each 35mm photograph had to be uploaded to files between 1 and 80MB for transfer to the reprographics and print departments. Each of these files was then blown up to at least 660MB to identify corrections needed and produce an image of a high enough resolution to be printed in large format.
What was the feedback?
First Light publishing director Lara Makleim said: "We were blown away with the result, it is spectacular. You could put on a Kiss album and open the book and it would feel exactly like being at one of their concerts."
XY Digital's Eric Ladd said: "This is the biggest job I have ever been involved it; it took 12 months to produce. The first batch of 100 books is being printed this month and I believe 40 have been sold so far. After that, between 200 and 300 books will be produced each month until Christmas. It is never-ending.
"It is good to know that our UK company is responsible for this work and good old British know-how got this project done – even down to the fact that our knowledge of the book sector made us qualified to go straight to the only printers in Europe who could have done this job."
