intrepid-mystic-bindery

[intrepid-mystic-bindery]

Guess who just realized they never posted the book they made for their spouse's birthday LAST YEAR? It's Comma! Have some pictures!

One of the movies we watched INCESSANTLY while we were dating, took along on our honeymoon, play a "Comma mockingly imitates characters" drinking game with, and have queer headcanons for is the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Why is it our favorite? I mean, have you SEEN the cast? Also The Hand Clench. Enough said. Since we haven't already purchased enough variations of the book, I obviously had to bind them another copy. I made my own typeset of the illustrated edition (sans the drop caps and chapter headers) and, since letters are a decent portion of the book, I picked out unique handwriting fonts for each letter writer.

Originally this was supposed to be a 2023 Christmas present but uh. Life happened and the book did not. So instead, I gifted them the textblock for Christmas and they helped choose the rest of the cover materials to complete for their birthday! Lots of purples, some pinks and reds, with a touch of gold - purple should surprise no one, obviously we got together because we share a favorite color. We even broke into my Crepaldi stash, though as it was my first time working with it, I didn't realize it would wrinkle quite so much during glueing and nearly cried to behold it. Thankfully the wrinkles mostly came out as it dried and pressed, so all was not lost! In repayment for the emotional distress, the rest of the casing in was a DREAM.

Should I have rounded this one? Absolutely. Did I? Certainly not, the concept terrifies me for no good reason. Did I cut the first perfectly lovely attempt at endbands off because they were just a few wraps off from symmetrical? I mean, have you met me?, of course I did, it would've bugged me. They're lovely now, move past it. Did I change up my usual colophon book curse to fit the theme? Holy Grail insults will always remain my beloved, but I am rather proud of this curse, everyone say thank you @daemonluna for the inspiration. Should I have done ONE MORE LOOK THROUGH before printing? Headers on chapter title pages and That One Pesky Image Placeholder HIGHLIGHTED YELLOW point to yes. Oops. But hey, that's what makes it unique, handmade, and crafted with love, right?

Technical stuff below the cut.

Bookcloth: Verona Plum from Hollanders

Cover Paper: Purple and White Waved Gelgit from @renato-crepaldi

Endpapers: Craft Consortium Ink Drops - Rose pack

Textblock paper: short grain cream from Church Paper

Titling: We R Memory Keepers foil quill in rose gold

Endbands: leather cording core, DMC embroidery floss bands

Body font: EB Garamond

Title font: Champignon

Handwriting fonts: Vladamir Script, Signatie, Notera, Wonderfuul Bewritten, Bellamy Stevenson, High Spirited, Magis Authentic, Modernline

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My personal goal is to try and make fanfic binding as accessible to everyone as possible, so here are some resources on how to make a fanfic hardcover for under $25.

This is a barebones bind for the broke college students and such. Happy to field questions, too!

Here's a proposed budget breakdown:

Loosely organized thoughts:

Fanfic bookbinders often share typesets amongst each other. Never pay for a typeset for a fanfic.

You'll hear a lot about grain direction for your printer paper, but as a newbie on a budget without your own printer, settle for some nice 92 bright paper. If you like the hobby, splurge after but expect to pay at least 2-3x more for short grain paper.

Printing is a pain because some copy shops won't let you print intellectual property smut, and it's very expensive. You are better off bartering instead or looking for a free printer on Buy Nothing.

You know the thick paper wrapping that comes with online orders? It's a good weight for endpapers if you need to scrounge. Paper grocery bags or gift bags (birthday presents) might work, too.

Ask your local library to give you covers from books they are throwing out. Ask for outdated textbooks (those covers are built like tanks) or three-ring binders that are too busted to be binders anymore.

Obtain a used book that was mass produced (so your destruction of it does not impede anyone's access) and maybe even become a little vindictive with it.

If you can afford it, I recommend the Olfa SVR knife (~$10)

If you can afford it, upgrade your ruler to a t-square.

I really hope this resource is helpful! I want to stress how possible this is and encourage people to cherish what they love through art.

If you are interested in fanfic binding and have a little more disposable income, I have an affordable Fan Fiction Bookbinding Starter Pack that I carry on my site. I pack them myself and drop them 1x/month on the 15th.

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I did a bind of all the bright places by @phantomphaeton and I'm pleased to announce that it is finished just in the nick of time to still be a 2024 bind! This was my first time using Affinity Publisher and boy howdy did we go round and round, but we got there in the end. 😮‍💨

As always I did an author copy, and as always I messed up the casing on one of them. Ah well. Live and learn? 🤷‍♀️

The idea behind the cover was for it to be Edwina's true colors being revealed by the tearing of the pink dresses she wore during her season. I couldn't get the pink to tear the way I wanted it to so a friend helped me come up with tearing the decorative paper instead. I think it turned out fabulously!

The end paper was beautiful but almost like cloth so I mildly panicked each time I had to glue it. I nabbed the chapter art from a book in the public domain, and let me tell you it was a ride trying to get all the chapter titles and subheadings in there. 😅

I'm super proud of the title page. I got a screenshot of the bangle falling during the wedding and it looks so good. 😭

For the half title page I tried my hand at a two page spread incorporating the chandelier, beach, and mango tree mentioned as some of Edwina's "bright places."

I love this fic so much and I was bound (hehe) and determined to cram as much symbolism as I could. Even the chapter pages are somewhat in reference to Friedrich saying he could walk forever in a garden full of thoughts of Edwina.

This is a beautiful fic, it was such a fun bind, and I have to shout out @purplephloxpress for the collab on the cover. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't given me this idea!

Phantom, dm me with details on mailing to you when you have them!

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This is my second non-fanfic bind! Copper Coins by Musuli (TLed by the amazing huxiyi), bound as a 600-page chonker of a quarto.

The book features handmade bookcloth, headbands, endpapers and their matching Oxford hollow (and edge speckling), and coin string decoration. I added distressed bronze toner-reactive foil to the spine label for an even more vintage look.

Fonts used: Adobe Jenson Pro, Grenze Gotisch, FZKai-Z03.

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There's quite a lot about punkpuns that I'm no longer happy with, but this is still very good and I want people to see it:

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Just a quick chaos bind because I needed something to donate to a raffle for an event I'm going to. It's made entirely of things I already had on hand; it is unique in that absolutely nothing about it was purchased for this specific project. I had a blast trying something new and I hope whoever wins it loves it!

(Also, peep the signature puncher in the first picture--it has my bindery name on it!!!)

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Source: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8uVHQp2/

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Proof of life endbands! I'm still around, but I've been adjusting to a new job and schedule and haven't spent as much time on bookbinding lately. It's spouses birthday this week tho and I'm determined to finish the book that was supposed to be their Christmas present in time for the occasion!

[intrepid-mystic-bindery]

Once upon a time, as a wee child, I dreamed of writing a book and getting it published, of seeing it on shelves and hearing of people's reactions and excitement for what I wrote.

One fanfiction in particular is near and dear to my heart, so when I got it into my head to bind one of my own fics, there was really only one clear choice: Green Sarabhas.

The first big decision was whether I'd do the series in four volumes or in one. Because I was making two copies, I opted for one volume because I really didn't want to make 8. 😅 The typesetting was a pain in the neck and the table of contents is four pages long, but we survived.

Shout out to @purplephloxpress for hosting me for a weekend and spending about twelve hours at their dining room table with me, lending me tools I didn't have and helping me troubleshoot such a large undertaking. 🥰 I still need to get one of these punching tools.

This is the first bind where I used book cloth, and it was a dream. I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but the book is sewn with four different colors of thread, one for each section of the fic. I contemplated doing four different colors in the end band too, but that was a step too far for me for this one. 😅

squiiiiiiiiiiish

I bought my own foil quill after playing with phlox's, so I did Claude, Sylvain, and Felix's Crests on the cover.

Now, here's the part I'm arguably most proud of and that made me cry for many different reasons: the dust jacket. I designed it in Canva, complete with end flap summaries and comments from the fics on the back, and printed it on poster board. I had to set my printer and computer to print a custom size paper and print on the non-glossy side of the poster board, but after much trial and error we got there. And when I say I cried, I am not kidding.

This fic was a labor of love, this bind is a piece of my soul, and I gave half of it to @astaraxion because we became friends due to this fic, so be sure to take care of it. 😉 I look forward to losing it together over the revisions and art that I did!

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Experimental bookbinding!

A couple of years ago there was a conversation in the Renegade discord about books styled after corsetry, and I thought it would be cool to model the actual construction after corsetry, not just the aesthetics. So,

Book pages are often held together by being sewn onto cords or tapes, which are then glued or tied to the cover boards

What if they were laced to the cover boards instead?

In this notebook, each section of folded pages is sewn individually. The sewing creates channels to thread the lacing through.

It took a couple of lacing attempts to get it to work. On an actual corset, the lacing would alternate being threaded out to in vs in to out, so that the corset would be able to lace completely closed. When I laced the book like this, the pages didn't stay in place--I needed the lacing to pull the pages towards the outside edge of the board at every pass through.

The pages are made of onesided graph paper, so they're blank on one side and gridded on the other. I plan to use this as a bookbinding planning journal. Technically, one could unlace the pages and replace them with a blank set when it's full.

The flat-felled seams and boning channels on the cover are purely decorative.

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Okay! I finished @starsoforionwrites's The Nature of Purity, and I have some things to say.

I love this fic. The joy the author experienced when writing it really shines through in the text. It ducks and weaves through canon in just the way I like. 10/10 fic. I couldn't put it down and I still find myself picking it up just to reread a favorite scene. All in all, *chef's kiss*.

Now, for the reason we're all here!

This is the first fic I've ever bound. It's the second book I've ever bound. With my limited experience I've decided that double fan binding is so much easier than sewing, but I sewed it and I only had to restart twice. Yay me!

I went with a leather look because I was going for the pureblood history books Draco tells Hermione about. I'm really glad I went with a faux leather, because I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been to do with real leather.

*squiiiiiiiiiish*

I had some fun experimenting with my stencils, which is why the cover got messed up. 🤦‍♀️I'm super proud of the lettering on the spine. Not pictured is the fundamental flaw that caused the case to somehow be skewed from the text block while appearing perfect, but that's okay. It still opens and reads perfectly, and I'm really pleased with it!

@starsoforionwrites, when you read this, DM me. I have a surprise for you. 😊

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it has taken me MONTHS but I am SO CLOSE to finishing typesetting @recreationalcatnip's the width of a mattress that I can TASTE IT

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Fanbinding: Like a Wildfire Burning by @werewolves-are-real

It's illogical to deprive the body of necessary nutrition, but old habits can be hard to break.

Before I left for the holidays back in Dec, I made a whole bunch of books, and four of them were for and in-person meet-up for a class with other Renegaders!

I bound "Like a Wildfire Burning" (on Ao3) for @pleasantboatpress since they love Star Trek & Spock. It's a Spock-centric fic, focused on his struggle with an eating disorder and being caught between two cultures.

For design, I researched to translate "Wildfire burning" into Vulcan and then how to write it in Vulcan calligraphy (back). The fabric is Colibri copper, and the endpapers are a chiyogami I picked up down in Kyoto. I found a great smoke vector that I was able to play with for the title and first pages. I went for a gold splatter on the edges.

Honestly though the best part of making this book has been being able to meet and hang out with manda in person!!

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2023 in books

better late than never, right?

2023 was a relatively slow year for me in bookbinding, but I still made 30+ books. (ask me how much time I spent on my other hobbies and it becomes clear why books were fewer.)

A5 books

the first A5 of the year was an entry for a bookbinding competition (which I didn't win), where the theme was climate change. I had a lot of fun putting it together and it was the first time I made an A5 tête-bêche book - I usually do these A6 or A7 size.

this was also the year I decided to start a collection of menocchio fics, which also led to experiments with printing directly onto bookcloth to get titles on the spine

what's fun about bookbinding is that you can Just Make A Book, but you can also Get Ideas And Run With Them with it. which is how I wound up with this black on black book. destiel necromancy fic, because of course it is

going back to something more colourful...Ulysses. not the James Joyce one, the slowburn 00Q one. named for a Tennyson poem.

final A5 book of the year is my Renegade Exchange book, which I bound for Silent Sun Press - a Crowley-centric genfic with outsider POV, so naturally I went for TV!Gomens colour schemes

A6 and A7 books

I started the year ambitiously - in addition to entering a competition, I started my urchin specials project. thus far I've still only bound these first three books for the project, but I plan to do more. first dustjackets as well!

I continued with the no-sew pamphlets and did three

I joined the Tiny Books Exchange, and as a proof of concept - before I typeset an A7 sized tête-bêche - I did a little tête-bêche of the two Temeraire fics I wrote for yuletide once upon a time

then followed of course the Tiny Book I bound for the exchange - my copy (test & proof of concept, bottom), the giftee copy (green, top right), and the author copy (blue, top left)

I typeset a lot more than I bind - I have plans to bind so and so, so I typeset it, but don't always have the time to bind it right away. so I have folders full of typesets ready to go at a moment's notice. this one was typeset a whole year before I bound it

are these paperbacks or just very slim hardbacks? I call them paperbacks as I used 0.5mm boards and they have no spine, but ymmv

this one definitely is a hardback - with slightly thicker boards, a spine, and two fics in one book. I do love those tête-bêches

at my work we have a lot of deliveries wrapped in this nice recycled brown paper that was just going into the recycling bin, and I thought: why not make books out of it? so I played around with it (and my printer) and came up with a neat aesthetic for paperbacks with breakaway spines (using 0.5mm boards)

will I ever stop with the tête-bêches? no. also this one has endpapers made from SEAWEED. how cool is that?

the last A6 of the year is this little collection of my own stories for a tiny Danish fandom. detectives and trauma, but make it about food? yes. food and cooking themed endpapers and cover papers, and the dustjacket has fake coffee stains on it. perfect

and that is all, folks. I did a lot of different styles and types of binding this year, I had fun with it, I learned a lot, and I'm happy with what I've created.

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Welcome to my first bookbinding project!

Background:

My best friend is pregnant, and I got it into my head that I wanted to get her a baby book. This presented several issues: 1. I wanted it to be calendar style, more like a journal of dates as opposed to a traditional milestone book, and 2. I wanted it to span five years of the child's life, because milestones don't stop after the child exits toddler-hood. So, naturally, I had to make it myself.

Designing the pages was easy enough with the help of Google Sheets. However, I went into this with absolutely no knowledge of how to accomplish it, so I ended up with a sheaf of loose-leaf paper to bind. According to my research, I had two options, and I settled on doing a double fan bind.

Here's the result:

The cloth spine could have been tighter, but you live and learn.

While that was drying, I called upon my intrepid leatherworking venture for the cover:

Don't tell her, but I'd never done a buckle before this. 😂

Next came actually attaching the pages to the binding, and when I couldn't find a tutorial for what I wanted...

...I settled on gluing construction paper to the pages and then gluing THAT to the leather.

The right pages are in color because after I finished printing them I ran out of colored ink! I think it's cute, though. 😅🤷‍♀️

The hole for the buckle gave me fits, and it's a little effed up, but it accomplishes its purpose.

I stitched her initials into the belt because I needed to affix it to the cover and I'm extra as hell.

And then, to complete this intrepid, homosexual audacity-fueled venture, I adapted my fanfiction logo into a bindery logo and ordered stickers from Canva.

Once the bun is out of the oven, I will decorate it with their name. For now it is only marred by a minor glue mess up. 😂

And there you have it! Mistakes were made, but I learned a lot and have no regrets! I hope she loves it. 🥰