Unofrtunately, you're trying to swim upstream with this. Here's the deal: odd numbered pages are always on the right (recto), even numbered pages on the left (verso). This is a convention as old as printing and as fixed as “the cover of a book goes on the outside,” so violate it only if you absolutely must.

You can tell InDesign to start numbering at 1 on any page, but that page, if it wasn't already a recto, will suddenly become one. Under normal circumstances, you can make the 3rd page, or the 501st page “page 1”, but not the 4th or the 44th without changing the spreads.

So, all that said, if you must make your numbering start on a left hand page, go to the Pages Panel flyout menu and uncheck “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle.” Then right-click on the page, choose “Section and Page Numbering Options,” click the “Start at Page” radio button, and put 1 in the number field.

Interesting. I've not seen or designed a fiction work that doesn't follow Chicago. Other than the occasional publication that puts an introduction on page 1 (some anthologies of short stories do that), I don't recall a book that began content numbering in the front matter. Specific publishers may have a house style that requires that, of course, but you'd know that from their style guide before starting the project.

For books in English, the conventions are well established. You can find lots of detail (possibly more than you ever want to know) in The Chicago Manual of Style under the general heading of book sections, and if you're designing for print you should have a copy on your bookshelf for reference. As far as numbering is concerned, lowercase Roman numerals start at i on the half title page and continue through the whole of the front matter (copyright page, TOC, preface, introduction, etc.). Content numbering begins at 1 on the first page of chapter 1 or, where it applies, the section opener (“Part One: My Adventures in Siberia”) or second half title page.

Odd numbers are always right-hand (recto) pages, and chapters always start on a recto unless they are specified as a two page spread, in which case page 1 would be a second half title or a section opener on the recto before the first chapter.

For magazines, the first recto after the cover is usually page 1; newspapers, the front page is page 1; other publications, “it depends.” Academic publications and professional journals usually have very specific style guides that you would follow. For a catalog, you can pretty much roll your own page numbering, provided it's visible and makes sense to the reader.

The printer is going to cut this using a die, and most printers are happy to supply a template for the designer so they don't have problems at production time. That would be the first thing to try.

The backup plan is to lay out the piece with the image sized as you have it, allowing at least 7 mm bleed, preferably 10 mm. Add to that a slug of another 10 mm on the three sides that will be glued (not the top). When you export the PDF, include the bleed, crop marks and slug. The printer will still have to figure out what to do with it, but that should be enough “spare” to meet any glueing process I've come across.

The problem is that “ignored” is a temporary status. If you close the document and reopen, you'll have to ignore them all over again. Building a set of grep styles all pointing to the same character style is probably the way to go in a situation like this. Then I'd load the text styles from the first (master) document so I could reuse them for new documents with the same product names.

Update: I've not seen any evidence of this in any of my CS5 book projects or some tests I just did. Although “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” it seems like it was introduced in 5.5 and not earlier.