How to Print a Family Book So It Does Not Look Homemade

The difference between a family book that gets kept and one that gets put in a cupboard is decided by two choices, and both are made before you print anything.

Making the Book  ·  September 2, 2026  ·  4 min read

People assume the quality of a family book is decided at the print shop. It is almost entirely decided before you get there, by two choices most people make without realizing they are choices at all.

Decision one: print double sided

The instinct is to print single sided, because single sided cannot show through. It is a reasonable instinct and it is the wrong call, and it is the single most common reason a family book feels like a document rather than a book.

A book has printing on both sides of the paper. That is what a book is. Print single sided and every second page is blank, the thing is twice as thick as it should be, and it reads as a stack of handouts no matter how good the writing is. Nobody can quite say why it feels wrong, but everybody feels it.

Show-through is a real problem and it is not solved by printing on one side. It is solved by using heavier paper, which is the next decision.

Decision two: use heavier paper than you think

Standard office paper is designed to be cheap and to go through a copier in volume. It is thin, it is bright white, and text printed on both sides of it will ghost.

Move up in weight and two things happen at once. The show-through disappears, and the page feels like a book page rather than a memo. It costs a little more per sheet and it is the highest-return money in this entire project.

The rest, in order of how much it matters

1. Margins wide enough for the binding. The inside margin needs more room than the outside one, or the text disappears into the spine. This is the most common fixable error in home-printed books.
2. Off-white rather than bright white. Bright white is a photocopier colour. A slightly warm paper reads better and photographs sit on it far more comfortably.
3. Page numbers and a contents page. A book without them is a manuscript. This is ten minutes of work and it changes how the object is treated.
4. Photographs printed at a decent size. Two large images beat eight small ones on every page of every family book ever made.
5. One test copy before the full run. Print a single complete copy, read it in your hands, and fix what you find. Errors are invisible on screen and obvious on paper.

How to place the photographs

Photographs are what makes a family book get picked up, and they are also where most home-made books go wrong. Four rules cover nearly all of it.

1. Fewer and larger. Two big images on a page beats eight small ones, always. A photograph small enough that you have to lean in to identify a face is not doing its job.
2. Caption every single one. Who, where, roughly when. An uncaptioned photograph in a family book is a wasted page within one generation, because nobody will know who is in it.
3. Check the resolution before you commit. An image that looks fine on a screen can print soft, and a scan from an old print is usually better than a photograph of a photograph.
4. Put them near the text they belong to. A block of plates in the middle is how commercial books used to solve a printing constraint you do not have.

Getting it to the print shop without a problem

Take a PDF, not a word processor file. A document file will reflow on somebody else's machine, fonts will substitute, and images will move, and you will not find out until you are holding the wrong book. A PDF is fixed and what you see is what prints.

Ask for one bound proof before the full run. Every shop will do this and it costs very little, and reading a complete copy in your hands surfaces errors that are genuinely invisible on a screen. Missing page numbers, a photograph on the wrong page, a chapter starting on the left when it should start on the right.

How many copies to print

More than you think, and the reason is not sentiment, it is arithmetic. The expensive part of printing is the setup and the first copy. Additional copies in the same run are much cheaper than going back in two years to print three more.

Count the siblings, the children, and the one relative who will ask for a copy the moment they hear it exists. That is your number. This is also why owning your own print-ready file matters so much: if the file is yours, printing more later is a decision about a print shop, not a negotiation with anybody.