Today’s finished project is a bound copy of the whole Interwoven series! I had planned for this to be my fourth Binderary book, but I only got the text block sewing done last month plus putting on the endpapers. Today I sat down and made the case with some of my lovely precut boards (get precut boards from TALAS, it will make you very happy), and cased the block.
Interwoven, or the Seamstress and the Lovable Stray, was published on the SugarQuill in 2002 by an author named Katinka31, who I was unfortunately unable to reach. As the subtitle suggests, it’s the story of an OFC - Abby Loomis, a weaver from a family that can make Invisibility Cloaks - and Sirius Black (remember in GoF, when he says he’s posing as a “lovable stray” in Hogsmeade?); it’s adorably romantic and I’ve had a soft spot for it for yearrrrrssssss. I think it says good things about the SQ as a community that this fic was posted and followed up by many one-shots and short fics in a period when OFCs, particularly OFCs who had romantic relationships with desirable canon characters and had special talents, were regularly mocked and their writers hassled because Mary Sues were seen as the worst thing ever.
OKAY NOW I CAN LET OUT THE NEGATIVITY. I am showing you all the ugliness even though it’s killing me. I don’t know what went wrong when I pasted on the endpapers but they ended up very wavy, and as you can see, moisture got into the text block too. I cut the spine stiffener slightly too wide, which also made casing in pretty difficult, such that I had to unpeel and reposition the back endpaper several times (fortunately I made paste today instead of using PVA) and it stretched BADLY and is now crumply and nasty. Even the front one has some issues, although fortunately it’s not as bad. The first two signatures were printed “color” rather than “black and white”, and even though the text is all black it made a weird blue shadow on all the pages. I made a weaving shuttle graphic to use on title pages of the fics within the series, and I converted the text to PDF at too low of a resolution so they look like ass. I hope someday I can get ahold of Katinka and can make her a copy that doesn’t have these problems!
One more book for the evening! This one. Okay. It’s not a fic. It’s a book. It’s not a GOOD book. But it is authentic erotic rpf dating from the year of our lord, 1861. Ish.
Folks, welcome to The Amorous Intrigues And Adventures Of Aaron Burr
It really isn’t good. But I won’t lie, I’m probably going to make it again. It cracks me up just to have this, and I have an acquaintance who suggested binding it in an authentic 1800s style, and? Yes??? This stupid thing delights me, I want twenty
Okay! I need to start posting pictures from this last month at some point, so let’s start with an easy grouping: a pile of works by @cacodaemonia! When my friend was (actively and deliberately) dragging me down deeper and deeper into the star wars pit, okay, so just imagine her hiding around the corner as I amble along, just minding my own business, her holding the reconstruction corps verse like a baseball bat, lying in wait
It worked!! Oh boy did it work. Will You Walk With Me dragged me in hard, Open Skies sunk its hooks into me, and I was an easy target when Cartography started dropping (and then I was deep enough to start looking up what happens to these characters in canon dgfhjg (we don’t talk about canon))
So! Here we’ve got the RCAU as it was like two and a half weeks ago, so it’s definitely a snapshot of a living verse, but it’s such a shame to hold off binding an au that’s in motion because you’re waiting for it to Conclude. The marbled fabrics with dots are for one shots (WYWYM in orange, Cartography in green), and the peacock marbling is for anthologies (RCAU in pink, Open Skies in blue). The other marbled fabric is a surprise, and the muted, faceted-looking fabric is for Fading Light and Cooling Space, since that wrapped up just as I was formatting these other books. I’ve still got a lot of posts to catch up on, but this was a set that I had been planning on as a project for the month, and it was SO delightful to see that vision realized :D
I made this for @leonarddaquirm in the bound fic exchange in the Renegade Publishing discord. It’s a Rurouni Kenshin fic, where Kenshin’s past and present selves swap places. I had fun stepping out of my usual fandom for this! (I’ve watched the anime, but I was never active in the fandom).
It’s bound in red/blue Duo bookcloth with a cutout effect and faux stab binding around the spine. The title/chapter font is Harukaze and the body font is Cormorant Garamond.
An anthology of nine of GallaPlacidia’s works. This started with me wanting to bind Scaredy Cat and then quickly became a massive three volume project but I am so so happy with how these turned out!
It took about three months, from typesetting to the final pressing, but I’ve finished binding my trilogy Drifting Together! I was a bit ambitious with this project and paid for it in lots of small alignment mistakes . These books were my first attempts at:
Printing on fabric
Sewing together multiple pieces of fabric into a cover (tricky, lots of math, but necessary because my printer wouldn’t take anything larger than letter sized)
Embroidered covers
Making bookcloth
Translucent vellum title pages
Embroidered faux headbands
Chisel trimming books
The beautiful illustrations are pieces I commissioned from @kurxo way back in 2020. I was, perhaps, a little optimistic about how soon I’d be starting this project.
I bound Raising Warriors by CmonCmon! This is a Star Wars - The Clone Wars story with the rarepair Shaak Ti/Colt set in the Soft Wars AU by @thefoundationproject, which makes it about as niche as it gets, but I helped beta it and I love it.
Sadly I messed up a print and did not have enough paper left to make my own copy, so having it on my own shelf will have to wait - this one is on its way as a gift to Cmon.
Books! I bound the Home Out In The Wind series, which is a Star Wars sequel trilogy Poe/Finn/Rey delight by Bomberqueen. It was typeset by Runawaymarbles, and I jumped at the opportunity to do some binding I didn’t have to typeset first. All my thanks to writer and typesetter for giving permission for others to bind it - I’m thrilled to have these on my shelf!
I had all sorts of plans for matching-but-not-identical covers and then that fell through with simply not having enough matching papers that felt right for the story, so I ended up going with this Duo bookcloth and a printed marble.
Foil iron-on my beloved. It looks so lovely for titles.
My binding of What We Pretend We Can’t See by gyzym as a gift to the lovely @clovenhoofbindery for our recent bookbinding exchange. Photos courtesy of the setting sun and my library’s children section lol. Extra shots under the cut!
My binding of A Turn of the Earth by microcomets! Made as part of a ficbinding exchange for my friend Sapphy! Extra shots of the hand-drawn title page art and scene dividers under the cut!
My special, tiny binding of a very interesting story, Triquetra by Kirstyn McDermott. This is an A9 sized book, trimmed by only a few millimeters. This story is available to read on Tor’s websiteor for purchase as an ebook through Am*zon, so I decided to print and bind it for my tiny book library. My first time ever trying raised cord bindings and the scale of the work was not in my learning favor lol. Internal and process shots below the cut!
Told myself not to make this and then did it anyway, oops. Story of my life. Anyway, call this the second edition of Latte Art, now about 60k longer and comprised of five whole fics (including one secret fic, ha). That’s so much coffee shop AU but I have no one to blame but myself.
Typesetting is essentially the same as it was in the first version, plus a couple of tweaks, cause I’m always learning new things. Better spacing, more uniform chapter titles etc. Also has headers now and added in title cards for the separate stories, because why not. There’s also a couple of secret bonuses for @genuineformality to find once they receive their own copy.
This paper is actually from the same artist as the original binding, and the one I was gonna use initially before I decided to go with a monochrome / red colour scheme. Six months ago I thought a coffee-coloured coffee shop AU would be too on the nose haha… oh how the tables have progressed into slightly smaller tables. Got tan bookcloth for this one, alongside brown headbands that I promise are present, plus taupe grey endpapers and that nice chocolate ribbon. Yes, that’s a raven on the frontpapers. It’s about the vibes.
396 pages and typeset in Old Standard / Sunday
[Image ID: A series of photos of a bound copy of the latte art fics. The first image shows the front of the book, which is bound in tan bookcloth with block print frontpapers depicting a stylised raven and lots of curving branches. The second image shows the title page of the book, which reads “latte art and other stories - pyrrhlc” alongside an image of a coffee cup and saucer with a foam heart on top. The taupe endpapers are also visible. The book is resting on a wooden table and a silver pocket watch is sitting beside the book in each picture.
The third image shows the book open at a random page, with the same silver pocket watch lying on the centrefold of the pages. The book pages are a soft cream colour and the edges of the raven design are visible alongside the book’s chocolate brown ribbon.
The fourth and fifth images show the contents page, which lists the five fics in the series as well as a small stylised sketch of a cappuccino, and one of the title cards for the fics, which reads “ii. with only your skin as a carry-on”. The fic title is outlined by a sketchy frame comprised of four corners.
The sixth image shows the book’s endpapers, which are a plain taupe grey. The pocket watch is sitting next to the book with the case open to show the time. End ID.]
I’ve been pretty quiet lately! That was because I was in a race against time having fun seeing if I could meet an arbitrary challenge testing my bookbinding speedrunning abilities. In like, December, I made a remark about how it would be neat to challenge myself to like, NaNo, but for crafts, a month where I tried to see if i could average more than a book a day. Then some of the mad lads at @renegadepublishing ran with my offhand remark and made a whole fun community event out of it! The presentation on hidden fore edge paintings was part of this, and other presenters gsve fascinsting talks od their own as well. And also they named the book-a-day tier after me, so i was honor-bound to complete it sffhfjnf
So! This is the very tail end of binderary for me, and I’ve come in at a beautifully round 30 books for the month. Collecting text, typesetting, everything, it all happened in February. More pictures will be forthcoming, I just need to look through my camera roll and see if they’re all usable, group by author/theme, etc. Spread them out a little, probably. Get a group shot with everything (except the necklace book, alas, that’s already been given away). The month culminated with me making cases for 17 books yesterday and casing them all in, so I am VERY tired right now and need to stagger to bed, but I am really, really proud of myself right now
And additionally! As I was basking, I went back into my tumblr to check on when this hobby entered my life, and surprise surprise, this marks the exact one year anniversary of my first tagged bookbinding post. I’ve come a WAYS, and I absolutely love it! My tracking spreadsheet is out of date, and I think I last updated it on the laptop that just died, lmao, but this puts me somewhere slightly north of 130 books in the last year. Guys, I’m really, really proud of myself right now :D
I threw myself headfirst into a new hobby: bookbinding/fanbinding—printing and binding my favourite fanfics in actual book form.
These are the two copies of my very first project, for which I chose Monsters and Marionettes by the ever fantastic @writhingbeneathyou, a collection of Naruto Founders horror-themed ficlets (mind the tags if you click the link :P). I love how the colours and paper looks together! Of course I also learned a LOT, but these will always be my babies
I recently got into bookbinding and my first project was the fanfic Entwined by the lovely @purplewitch156 . I started about 3 months ago but I was quite busy so I only finished this morning. It’s not perfect but I’m still very happy with the result and with the awesome response I got from the author. I’m glad I was able to ‘give back’ to the author. Fanfic authors and fanartists keep us fed and happy after all!
Those who have read this fic will be able to tell quite easily where I took my inspiration for the design.
In which Molly Hooper gets a job, gets a degree, breaks a heart, has her heart broken, falls in love, keeps a secret, saves a life, runs a morgue, falls apart, pulls it together, and finds exactly what she didn’t know she was looking for–not necessarily in that order.
art by marielikestodraw, fic by @gyzym 135 pages / 56,053 words
Title Font: Atlantic Cruise
Body Fonts: Adobe Caslon, Eurostile, Verdana, Please write me a song, Arbery, Better Grade, Peaches For Breakfast
Q: hi! thank you so much for doing what you do sharing knowledge and building community. I’m interested in getting into bookbinding and have been trying to get my head around it and am feeling a bit overwhelmed! there’s so much information out there. your how to make a book document is so informative. do you have any tips on what kind of project to start with, what kind or quality tools are necessary, things beginners should know? thank you!
ASH: Thank you so much for your kind words!
If you’re over 18 and would like to talk bookbinding shop with a whole community of fanbinders, send an off-anon ask to @renegadepublishing for a link to our Discord. There are new beginners joining all the time and a lot of experience to draw from. Come join us in the humming epicenter of the fanbinding movement!
For your first project, I would recommend you work with a fic that really fires you up and motivates you personally. Try to keep it 100k words or under.
