Firstly what's the difference between a Guest book and a Visitors book? Essentially the term visitors book is used in a business or corporate environment whereas guest books are more personal and related to hospitality and weddings. For the sake of ease we will refer to everything on this page as a guest book.
Everything we make is bespoke, which means nothing is "off the shelf". You, the customer, decides and chooses all the elements of your book, from sizes to what material it is covered in (or consists off). The colours of the material, how it is personalised on the cover and lastly the wording and the layout of the pages. It is very much a custom made guest book that is bespoke to you. If you are looking for some inspiration, have a look at out gallery page here
Guest Book Size & Format
The traditional size for a guest book cover is to fit the pages of an A4 landscape page or if you are in North America it's an 8.5" x 11" page. That said, because everything we make is Taylor made and bespoke, we can make your guest book cover to fit any size paper and also any format, landscape, square of portrait. There are limitations what on we can print ourselves, but we have a selection of very good local printers who can print on larger sized paper.
The type of products that we make for guest books can either be screw post binders or ring binders. The former is the more popular of the two as the pages turn more like a traditionally bound book in that they are held tightly in the left hand margin. Ring binders also work well, particularly for large numbers of pages. They tend to be more popular as corporate visitors books.
A Screw Post Visitors Book
A Case Bound Screw Post Binder in Beige Buckram outer cover and Linen inner cover and Blind Deboss personalisation.
A Hidden Screw Post Binder with full colour UV digital printed cover
A Brown Leather Screw Post Binder with Blind Debossed Cover
A Ring Binder Visitors Book
Covered in Black Buckram with a Alton Red Book Cloth inner cover and 2 ring 25mm mechanism. The Personalisation was a colour foiled company logo.
Guest Book Pages & Paper
As mentioned above, traditionally we work with A4 Landscape (210mm x 297mm) or for North America 8.5 inches x 11 inches. The most popular of binders for guest books are screw post binders. The pages are bound (gripped) on the left hand margin and therefore turn like a book. For A4 covers we use 4 posts and for the American covers we use 3 posts. Again as this is bespoke we can change the four to two should you request it.
We supply good quality 175gsm (45lb) landscape paper in A4 and 8.5 x 11 that has been pre-punched and scored (creased) in the margin which makes turning the page over the posts easier. This can be sold blank or alternatively we can print a logo or a name at the top of the page and then if you wished a grid underneath with the titles; Date, Name, Address, Comments. This can be as and how you would like it, because it's bespoke. One of the advantages of a screw post guest book is that pages can be added or taken out, but its also that we can customise the pages.
The number of pages that can be placed between the covers.
It is quite common that we might have an order where a customer doesn't either know how many pages they want, or equally thinks a round number like 100, seems about right - all quite fair, as how many is the right number? A screw post binder is only limited to the number of pages by the length of the posts, however the more pages you have the harder it is to write in the centre part of the book. 40 sheets is comfortable, 50 sheets of 175gsm in a A4/8.5 x 11 book is quite a lot, particularly if your guests are writing on both sides of the page. Quite often we will supply up to 100 sheets, but will only place 50 between the cover.
Hard Cover Bound Guest Books
We can also supply hard cover books with the pages bound into the cover (as below). The paper is 100gsm Ivory paper and is 80 pages. Each page is split into three sections- Date, Name and Email/Address/Comments. These book blocks are bought in so are not customisable, but the covers are, and you can choose from any of the materials mentioned below as well as the personalisation.
Cover Materials
There is wide range of materials you can cover your guest book in from rayon book cloth, to buckram, which is a rayon cloth covered in a hard waring acrylic coating. Also faux/vegan leather to genuine leathers.
Leather is split into two different styles. The leather bound guest book whose product choice would be the Case Bound Binder with a cover choice of genuine chrome tanned 1.5mm leather, to the more straightforward, Leather Screw Post Binder which uses 3.5mm top grain, Italian veg tanned leather.
Fabric covered guest books opens the style of binder to all the screw post binders (bar the 3.5mm leather) and the ring binders. We urge caution with book cloth outer covers as being a cloth cover they are prone to easy marking.
The choice of cover materials can be found on our swatch page here.
Guest Book Personalisation
What is a bespoke, custom made guest book if it is not personalised? Your options are quiet wide, from anything involving a couple of lines of text like, underneath each other which is either blind embossed or colour foiled into the cover, to the same involving a logo in the bottom right corner or indeed in the centre of the cover, with the words "guest book" or "visitors book" in the bottom right. We can also involve full colour printing of the cover as well (so long as you choose Buckram as a cover choice). More information on personalisation options can be found here
For wedding guest books, it is worth noting that if you have a wedding stationery style 'logo' or emblem, we can usually incorporate that either on the cover or on the pages. We would need the right type of artwork from your stationery designer, but this is not normally an issue. An option would also be incorporating your wedding invitation in the cover, as per the example at the bottom of this page (click link here) which is headlined 'recessed space'
While the products that you see on the Collection or Product Page are all A4 Portrait and likely not in the colour of material that you want, when you click onto the Build Product Link, everything is then customisable.
If you need some inspiration, click on the Gallery page link here and look on the top menu for the heading GUEST BOOKS. Each will have a break down of what materials were used and personalisation options were chosen.
If you are in the Hospitality Industry we have a special page just for Hospitality that can be found here.The same can be found for Superyacht crew here. Weddings also has it's own special page here.
