Although there have been notable instances of very large photography books being printed, there doesn’t seem to be a way to search books by their size.
In other words are there printing presses that handle art books beyond folio size?
Books can be any size.
Web presses can often handle widths of 35", even extending to as much as 56".
Often it's the bindery machines with limited size support, but if one wishes to hand-bind, the only limitation then become press size capabilities.
Form vs Function
One would probably question what use a "book" is with 35" wide pages. It would not be an easy task to turn pages, much less keep pages from getting wrinkled, creased or torn.
According to the 2007 Guinness World Records, the largest published book in the world was The Little Prince printed in Brazil in 2007. Its size is 2 m × 3.1 m (6.6 ft × 10.2 ft).
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I used to work at a large sheet-fed offset litho specialist. 1000x1400 was our largest common sheet size. I never saw the attached bindery ever make anything huge as a finished book size & doubt either of the machines (stitch or perfect) could handle anything larger than you could find on a library bookshelf. We could cut it as we had guillotines you could throw 1x1.4m around in easily, but not then bind it. – Tetsujin Jan 26 at 7:11
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My experience is that binders in recent years have mostly moved on to newer and more automated machines that generally cannot handle anything larger than 300x370 mm, so without finding a specialist binder (or hand-binding), that is likely to be your maximum size in practice, at least here in Europe. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 26 at 10:01
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@JanusBahsJacquet Thanks for that info, do you know of any specialty shops that handle larger sized books? – MichaelZ Jan 26 at 16:44
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@MichaelZ Unfortunately not, no. A few years ago, I set a book at 420x340, and it wasn’t until we were getting ready to send it to the printers that we found out there weren’t any binders who’d be able to bind it – ended up having to scale the whole thing down because we couldn’t find any binders that could do it and weren’t insanely specialised and hyper-expensive. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 26 at 16:58
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@JanusBahsJacquet, working at a small offset print house (also Europe) I can confirm that. I don't know about that exact format (300x370 mm). Probably varies a few cm from binder to binder, but it's in that ballpark in my experience. – Wolff Jan 26 at 18:17
