Way back in the Seventies, the character sheets in RPGs, and other record sheets for other sorts of games, were printed with a permission to copy for personal use.

In recent years Print-on-Demand services have reached the point of competing with conventional printing on price. The places which do this are rather keen on being sure they don't fall foul of copyright, just as photocopy shops did in the Seventies.

If I want to have a .pdf manual printed and bound, in there an explicit grant of permission I can point to?

(Not that I want to, unless the content has improved a lot.)