buildingbooks

[buildingbooks]

Custom ordered a white leather journal. It is made to fit with white - red goth costume. The book is 10" x 13" large and has 600 pages.

[buildingbooks]

Behold, it's my first self-standing lectern book!

I've wanted to bind the @mxtxfoodzine into a hardcover book ever since I first discovered them in November, and this binderary I finally got around to it 🎉

I figured a lectern case would be perfect for a recipe book, plus I'd been wanting to try it for a while anyways! There's definitely some glue spots and wonky corners, but for a first try I'm very happy with it :)

Also a huge thanks to @spockandawe 's spreadsheet and all the people who wrote down their findings in the @renegadeguild 's discord server, I'd never have figured this out without y'all!

[buildingbooks]

In all honesty...

I want to see divorces happen. I want to see women leaving their partners who voted for trump. I want to see men leaving their partners to vote for trump.

I want to see people cutting ties. Children with their parents who voted for trump. Brothers and sisters cutting ties with their siblings who voted for trump.

I want to hear about people complaining that they can't get dates or get laid because they voted for trump.

People who voted for trump are bad people and should have no access to you. It should be a deal breaker. If it isn't, then you're excusing what trump stands for, and you're just as bad.

If you voted for trump... I hope fully realise what you have chosen. You failed the people around you, and I hope you eventually feel the weight of that shame.

[buildingbooks]

This is gorgeous

“DIG”

Appearance:

A hardcover book with no title or author. It has 96 pages. The covers and every single page of the book have been marked with dirt.

Content:

Every page only has the word “DIG” in a small neat typeface in the centre of each page without any variation.

Abnormality:

Reading the book causes a psychological effect that leads to an obsession to DIG. The reader will be unable to suppress their compulsion to DIG and will continue to do so until their death. The cause of death is normally suffocation due to the hole they’ve dug collapsing in on itself.

Classification:

The book is clearly belonging to forever deep beneath creation. It burrows in to its victims minds and leaves the compulsion to DIG until they suffocate. Close spaces, dirt and suffocation. It will be placed in the suitable wing.

As only reading a single word will cause this effect the book has been placed on the do not access list to prevent anyone else being compelled to DIG.

[buildingbooks]

Fellas, fellas

Why on earth are you BUYING PHYSICAL BOOKBOUND COPIES OF FANFICTION????

ACTUALLY WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOOKBINDING FANFICTION TO SELL?!?!?!

IF ANY OF YOU DO EITHER OF THESE THINGS, GET OUT!! I AM NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN.

In all seriousness though, authors on AO3 have begun to pull their works off of the site to avoid getting sued by people stealing their works to make a pretty bound book for profit. Entire accounts could be shut down as well.

Listen, I’m all for saving favorite works by printing them out and putting them in a binder, or learning how to make a bookbound copy yourself and/or assembling one with a pre-made and purchased fancy binding for a fanfic FOR YOURSELF or AS A GIFT to someone, but making bindings with and putting fanfiction in it TO SELL is where I draw the line.

Literally the entire point of AO3 is that you can read it FOR FREE.

It is DISRESPECTFUL for people to make money off of hardbound copies because guess what, the original creators of these fics get nothing. We are literally only writing fanfiction for our own pleasure.

Buying and selling book-bound fanfiction is also ILLEGAL YOU DUMB SHITS. People who are selling content while claiming to be a book binder is a misconception of their services. Book binders make the covers and all that, not the actual content of the book. Selling fanfiction is also an immediate violation of copyright law / Creative Commons licenses. The original fan work will get erased from the internet.

Fanfiction is already a legal grey zone since they are works being written about are protected by copyright. Copyright holders can in fact go after writers as well as the person who sold the fanfiction.

This also goes for people who steal fanart and, claim it as theirs, and put a price on it.

Don’t make it worse.

rest assured, we can still write our fanfics and make our art.

Buying a binding for you to assemble onto your own fanfiction or fanfiction you printed for PERSONAL USE is fine.

HOWEVER,

Bookbinding fanfiction for profit is literally ruining things for everyone. DON’T.

If I see any of them on Etsy, I swear to god-

[buildingbooks]

Me💙🩷🤍🩷💙

2018 - 2024 (38yo)

[buildingbooks]

"the books are not going to fuck you" is honestly the best part of this.

Do whatever you like to your books! Dog ear them, tear the pages out of them when you're done, turn them into crafts, grow mushrooms on them.

That even goes for my books if you ever have the chance to have one. I don't care what you do with them as long as you're enjoying yourself. The worst thing you can do to a book is not use it.

Go nuts, show nuts, whatever.

I know this is gonna piss off nerds but paperbacks are superior to hardbacks

[buildingbooks]

Gosh, I love that you're making the effort to do things that you love, and to follow your interests.

I will be honest and say that yes, leather is scary, but it is no more scary than paper or cloth. Each just has its own little quirks you need to learn. So my advice there is to find some cheap leather and learn. Make mistakes.

The scariest thing about leather is the price, but that is what cheap leather is for. Once you get used to how to handle it, expensive leather will feel like a dream.

Keep up the amazing work. You're doing such a good job.

Proud of you for taking up the hobby.

Inspired by @buildingbooks I thought I would post some of my bookbinding projects. This first one is a coptic bound book with awesome travel themed paper around the signatures. I was so please with the chevron stitching.

Next is my rebound copy of the Deathly Hallows. I embroidered the symbol onto wool felt and made it into book cloth. I also added new end pages, headbands and bookmark ribbon.

The black and blue book is my first attempt at leather binding which I gave to my beloved for his birthday. Leather binding is pretty scary as there are so many ways you can mess it up. I don’t have any of the tools at home for leather work so I’ll be sticking with cloth and paper binding.

Lastly is my first ever case bound book made with my own book cloth. I have a lot of ideas for upcoming Christmas presents, including some nifty photo albums. Itching to get stitching!

[buildingbooks]

Little life tip from one trans girl to another:

If you're after bigger frames to give a more feminising look - look in the sunglasses section. The frames are usually much larger, and you can get clear lenses in them.

Just ask.

no. i technically, probably need them. but i keep putting it off cause i'm scared.

[buildingbooks]

The best thing I can suggest is that you just... Do it.

There are plenty of blogs on tumblr that are bookbinders, and several discords too. You can find so many tutorials online and if you follow the style of you want to do you can learn how to make books like the ones you pictured.

If you can cut and you can sew you can bind.

Good luck.

Anyone else REALLY wish they could start bookbinding? I wish that I could but I've no idea as to where I would begin. It just seems so cool and fun to do, and I've seen so many posts of people binding their favourite fanfictions which I wish I could do as well! Maybe one day I'll try picking up the craft, but till then I'll just continue trying to learn how to crochet. Anyone else want to try bookbinding?

[buildingbooks]

yes

question for y'all

should I make a sideblog for my bookbinding activities, or continue posting here?

[buildingbooks]

The last flower book I made during that flurry of activity back in… April? Incorporated an actual dead leaf so it’s ridiculously delicate. Rather than a straight loquat dye, I tried to use ribwort leaves for some reason and it produced such a mirky, dingy color that I actually kind of hate love it. Now here, above all the others, is a Flower of Evil ;) 

[buildingbooks]

You know what. Screw people who don't like dog-earing their books. "Nooo you're ruining the pristine Literature Paper, heathen!" For whom am I ruining it, girl? For the sum total of one person, or maybe 2-4 if I let friends borrow it? I'm going to come into your house and make origami out of all of your precious widdle hardbacks

[buildingbooks]

Gosh

You know... I'm always amazing and surprised when one of my posts kinda blows up. Waking up and seeing so many reblogs and likes makes me really really happy. I love reading everything that people put in the tags, and what they write when they reblog. I am so glad that my work brings joy to people. It also inspires me to do more.

[buildingbooks]

You misspelled "continue" as "stop". I don't even know how you made that mistake. The keys aren't even close to each other

I'm not saying I'm out of control, but I am saying that it's probably time for me to stop binding faraway wanderers

[buildingbooks]

Can.... can I ask how... do learn bookbinding? .-. It’s like... a distant goal of mine but I am very 🤷🤷🤷🤷 on starting

The good news is that it’s extremely attainable!! So, the easiest entry level tier for bookbinding is stitching together individual signatures (the folded pieces of paper nested together to make sections of a book), and the easiest material is doing that with is just regular printer paper. That was what keyed me into this, my dad was printing little short documents for work and sewing them together so he could have a non-screen version of what he needed to reference. I usually try to work in the range of signatures that use 5-10 sheets of paper (which gives you 20-40 pages as a booklet), though it’s possible to go smaller, especially if you’re working with thicker paper. I haven’t tested the upper end, but that’s where I’m comfortable.

NOW. Before I get into printing, let me take a detour (printing is where things get, like, technologically complex, because it depends on what software and printer you have access to, but that doesn’t have to be connected to the mechanics of Making A Book

SeaLemon’s youtube channel was where I started out! A lot of her videos are about various ways to make smaller notebooks, though her videos on casebinding, kettle stitch, and making bookcloth are most relevant to what I’m doing now. but she also has a LOT of smaller-scale tutorials that are great for pulling together a little notebook of your own, or a sketchpad, things like that. 

And the videos are really easy to follow. I don’t reference her anymore for the casebinding work, but I do someday want to go back in there and experiment with more of the stitches for pulling together cute little notebooks. My exposed-spine books and the ones that were covered with a single piece of fabric were done from her tutorials. I want to say that SeaLemon was my primary reference for making my text blocks, while this next channel is a really extensive look into the casebinding part of things.

I appreciate Das Bookbinding a lot, even though it was SUPER overwhelming when I was just starting out, and I wouldn’t have been able to follow anything. But even before I was able to follow along, these videos show a lot of like... the mechanics of making something so polished and complex, even if I’m not able to imitate all the steps myself. I used these videos as a reference for the set of books with the fabric spine + paper cover + fabric corners, for example. I haven’t done a deep dive into this channel, so there may be more accessible videos in there than the ones I dug up, but regardless, it’s an EXCELLENT resource.

And now... printing. This is where it’s hardest to give concrete advice, and I hate telling people they should go give money to huge corporations for their software, or pay huge amounts of money for fancy hardware, but I am also a coward who buckled and paid for word really early, and was fortunate enough to receive a color laser duplex printer as a gift a few years back, so I don’t personally have a good grasp on the most effective free/cheap options out there. So I can only speak to the expensive crap, but I know there are less expensive ways to do this too.

So! The two programs I have used are adobe acrobat and microsoft word. I originally was working out of google docs, where I printed to pdf, opened in acrobat, and printed as booklets. Adobe acrobat has a booklet option in the printing menu, where you can’t select your own signature size, but if you say ‘print as booklet’, and then print twenty pages at a time, you can generate your own ten-sheet signatures. The downside of doing this is that I was not making good use of the space, because the aspect ratios were off, and I had big margins I couldn’t control.

Once I realized that, and also realized that a lot of the files I wanted to print were larger than google docs wanted to handle, I bought a word license. Word also has a way to do booklets, where you can go to page layout, select booklet mode, and then select the number of pages you want in each signature (divide by four to get the number of sheets it will use). I print from word to pdf, which shuffles all my junk around for me to get it in order it needs to print, if that makes sense. It’s difficult to describe, but really not too difficult to do, especially if you have a short story or something to mess around with yourself, so you can print it off, fold the pages, and assemble it in order. Also, page numbers are your friend, even if they’re a pain to wrangle. I’ve had to match up dropped sheets without page numbers before, and I was FULL of regrets.

Now, I know that some people use inkjets, and some people do two-sided printing with one-sided printers, but i also know that other people have made use of other printers they have access to, or have taken books to places like staples or kinkos to use the printers there. I don’t know anything about how difficult or expensive that is, but it’s an option!

Now, one downside of this hobby is that it takes a NUMBER of small items to make it work, but they are typically small, and none of them have been that expensive. First, to assemble, I print off my sheets and fold them in half. And then I use a bone folder to really get those creases sharp. I mark off places to put holes and use an awl to punch them. I sew things up using either embroidery floss for short books (two strands, run over a block of beeswax) or waxed linen thread for long ones, using a curved needle. There are bookmaking ribbons you can use to give spines extra hold, but I haven’t used those. When it’s done, I glue my spine using a glue brush and sandwich my book somehow (I followed a sealemon tutorial to make a book press with two cutting boards, or I bury books under a stack of textbooks). 

I have a stash of heavier paper and fabric that are suitable for covers and endpaper, and to convert cloth into bookcloth (another sealemon tutorial), I have iron-on adhesive sheets and tissue paper. Once my book spine is set, I may glue a piece of mull/muslin to it, and/or a piece of ribbon for a bookmark. I cut my covers and spine out of chipboard, using a craft knife, guide ruler, and cutting board, then everything is ready to assemble.

That sounds like a lot, and there are other optional items I didn’t include, but none of these things are that big, or that expensive. I think my cutting board was the most expensive item I purchased. And if you just want to start with booklets, you can absolutely get started with a regular straight needle and thread, and still accomplish plenty. It’s been interesting as a hobby, because I haven’t done many things where the tiers of increasing complexity were so clearly visible, if that makes sense? I took my time trying new techniques, and I’m consistently becoming happier and happier with my efforts, but even back at the beginning when I was aware I barely knew what I was doing, the first time I glued a text block into a case I had made was a WILD feeling, and I still feel like a hell of an amateur (and don’t know enough to gauge how accurate that feeling is asdgsfda), but the earliest steps of learning to bind a book are highly, highly attainable, and I absolutely recommend it.