gargoyleandgremlinpress

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

This World is Gonna Break Your Heart by Lise (Binderary 2024/Typeset Exchange 2023)

This World Is Gonna Break Your Heart by @veliseraptor is a canon-divergent MDZS fic where Jiang Cheng died, and Jiang Yanli lived, and is a very rarepair Jiang Yanli/Xue Yang.

The cover is chiyogami paper, and it sadly does NOT take stencil vinyl nearly as well as Lokta paper, as I peeled it off incredibly carefully and still ended up having to patch a few places with a black marker, so I don't think we'll do that again. The spine is the sadly-discontinued Colibri graphite, so shiny!

Double-core endband, sewn with sewing thread to get the colour combo I wanted. This is one of two books where I attempted rounding the spines, and while shaping it before gluing went okay, I had a ridiculous time curving the spineboard to match, and it turns out the cardboard I was using was too thick. Next time, something closer to a manila folder! Endpaper are lokta mulberry paper, and I deliberately chose a piece that came with a waterstain because it reminded me of a tearstained page, appropriate for a tragedy.

This was a pinch hint for the 2023 @renegadeguild typeset exchange, and there are some more pics and notes on the typesetting over here!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Something at the Door by Pip

This is one of my all-time favourite horror fics in the MDZS fandom. I'm a sucker for a good ghost story, and I love the worldbuilding and creeping unreality and unreliable narrator-ness of it all, the gradual reveal of how everyone got to where they and how it echoes but doesn't exactly match canon, and the solid ghost story backing it all up.

I am also still amazed that the cover turned out, because those were some VERY thin lines to stencil on. This fic by @varterrall, art by verdaenoir, was a 2021 MXTX Big Bang fic, and such a great combo of story and art!

I just keep coming back to red and black for the colour scheme whenever I bind a horror fic (there's one more in my emotional support textblock stack right now) but hey, it works especially well for WWX.

Endpapers are mulberry fibre lokta paper, the cover and spine are acrylic paint with a Cricut stencil (and a whole lot of swearing and holding my breath for the lines on that door) and endbands are a mix of perle cotton and embroidery thread.

More red and black in the typeset, and you can't go wrong with creepy trees, especially when there's a pivotal scene or two in a forest. The bind exceeded my expectations and I'm really happy at how the whole thing came together!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

This typeset of Pentimento by orange_crushed was created by @teleportbooks for me in the 2022 @renegadeguild typeset exchange! (And bound as part of my Binderary 2023 stack, and look, I am REALLY behind at posting right now, and going to schedule some posts to catch up.)

This fic is a MDZS Wangxian modern AU set in a museum, where Lan Wangji is an art conservator, and Wei Wuxian is an art handler. (Drama! Tension! Meeting after years apart!) One of the joys of a well-constructed AU is seeing how the author recontextualizes canon, and I really enjoyed how the pieces fit together in this fic, as well as Lan Wangji's voice and point of view.

I raided my wife's art supplies for this one (also for the most themed photo op I've done to date) and used two different types of canvas for the book cloth. The lighter cover is just untreated canvas, backed with fusible interfacing and tissue, run through a home laser printer for the cover, and the title on both the cover and spine is acrylic paint using a Cricut-cut stencil. The darker canvas on the spine was gessoed and had a backing on it, and it did NOT want to stick with wheat starch paste, and only held with great reluctance with straight PVA glue. But it worked in the end! The endpapers are some of my wife's gelli-plate printing experiments, for a modern art vibe.

The typeset is lovely and elegant, with a title page set up like a gallery placard, and @teleportbooks included all of the artwork referenced in the fic as if they were colour plates in an art book! Look at this gorgeousness...

I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out overall, and the setting was definitely fun to riff off with the materials used. (Although I will only use that darker canvas again under duress... or for something else where it's the perfect fit, honestly.)

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Hear A Song This Deeply by so_shhy

Did I get everything I wanted to done for Binderary this year? Ahahahaha no. Life intervened and I most certainly did not. But you know when I DID finish books? Binderary 2023.

The typeset for this fic by @soshhy was a surprise gift to me from the inimitable @teleportbooks in the @renegadeguild 2022 exchange event. They know how much I love a good MDZS modern-with-magic AU! This is a singledad!WWX Wangxianfic, with some really creative worldbuilding around musical cultivation, and some great Lan brother character dynamics.

The cover is lokta mulberry fibre paper, and I do love the effect of using the raw edge overlapping the book cloth spine. Scrapbook paper endpapers came from a random pack scavenged out of my wife's art supplies, title and spine stencilled with gold acrylic paint.

Look at that typeset! Gorgeous. Thanks, E. Hyde!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

It's February, and that means Binderary for @renegadeguild! Binderary is a month focusing on binding books and participating in workshops and lectures, where you set your own goals and challenge level. My goal this year is to reduce my textblock pile. (But... those are my emotional support textblocks!)

I started the month with the pile above, plus some more typesets that were either not folded, or not yet printed. Before the month started, I got the big sheets of decorative paper in my stash for endpapers all cut down, and I've got some new fancy silk thread for endbands this year.

My goal is to finish off several books promised to other people, and to end the month with, at very least, a different set of emotional support textblocks than I started with!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Binderary 2025: Week 3

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our website (scroll down for the link).

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here’s the list of who’s running the week 3 workshops:

Making Fish Skin Leather: @roseserpentpress Speedrunning a book with a sewing machine: Eldahir Working with Leather: @blackoakbindery Mini Makin': Speed Run Bind Along: @simply-sithel Braided Headbands: Eka Italian Paper Case Bind: Eka Cover(t) Operations: @starblightbindery Making Mini Books: @queercus-books

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Binderary 2025: Week 2

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our website.

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here’s the list of who’s running the week 2 workshops:

All About Bookplates: @silentsunpress Typesetting in LaTeX: @queercus-books VI: Villainous Imposer: @simply-sithel Typesetting in Affinity: @kate2kat Typesetting in One Click: Microsoft Word Macros 101: @owlwinter8 Bookbinding Craft Along 2: Noodle Cutouts and Cover Board Fun: @celestial-sphere-press & @pleasantboatpress Italian Paper Case Bind Pt. 1: Eka InDesign for Beginners: @misanthropiczombie The "Single Section Conservation Binding" as a Beginners First Binding: Experience, Variations and Ideas: minx Decorative Papers: Triple Threat: @starblightbindery, @duran-binding & @mourningmountainsbindery

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Binderary 2025: Week 1

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our website.

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here’s the list of who’s running the week 1 workshops:

Specialized Typesetting in LaTeX: Celandine My Immortal and the History of Fan Studies: Parsley Typesetting in Google Docs: @sayornispress Introduction to Typography and Typesetting: @bearclubbooks Renegade Round-Up 2024!: @fanboundbooks, @robins-egg-bindery & @celestial-sphere-press You Shouldn't Have to Pay for that: Making Your Typesets Pretty For Free: @daemonluna Bookbinding Craft Along 1: Noodle

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Written by the Victors and Sheppard’s Law by @cesperanza !

I have been very short on bookbinding time for the last few months because of my job, but two kind friends shared their typesets with me so I could have a project to get me through my end of semester grading. Speranza’s excellent SGA fics gave me a great opportunity to experiment more with foiling covers and doing three-piece Bradel binds.

The end papers for Sheppard’s Law (left) are my own paste papers, while Written by the Victors got Lokta endpapers. Final important detail is that the endbands are silk.

The foil on Written by the Victors took me so many hours and failed attempts but I love how it ultimately turned out.

Thank you for writing such great fic, Speranza, and I am delighted to get to have these on my shelf. And thank you to @runawaymarbles and @daemonluna for the typesets!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

This past summer, I participated in the @renegadeguild Tiny Book Bang! This tiny book was created from a typeset (digital formatted file) made by another guild member, @fantailpress. It's fanbinding but not ficbinding in this case, since it's an excerpt of a podcast script.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality is a series of stories told in the format of a museum audio guide, so I staged my photos in a rough approximation of a museum exhibit. (Canadian quarter for scale.)

This particular episode segment is a Pied Piper story, told in overlapping, layered voices, and the typesetting reflects that in a very cool way. I've tried to echo the inside text with the static-style paint on the cover.

One of the nice things about tiny books is that you can use all sorts of scraps of material. Commercial book cloth, title and images stencilled with acrylic paint (I used a site to generate colouring book pages to turn the pied piper image into an outline to stencil), and endpapers are from a scrap pack a friend sent me, picked because they remind me of something you'd see in a kids' fairy tale collection.

Also, I got the sneaky glee of making something for a friend who didn't know I'd picked her typeset. (She was only the one who recommended the podcast to me, after all!)

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

This past summer, I participated in the @renegadeguild Tiny Book Bang! This tiny book was created from a typeset (digital formatted file) made by another guild member, @fantailpress. It's fanbinding but not ficbinding in this case, since it's an excerpt of a podcast script.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality is a series of stories told in the format of a museum audio guide, so I staged my photos in a rough approximation of a museum exhibit. (Canadian quarter for scale.)

This particular episode segment is a Pied Piper story, told in overlapping, layered voices, and the typesetting reflects that in a very cool way. I've tried to echo the inside text with the static-style paint on the cover.

One of the nice things about tiny books is that you can use all sorts of scraps of material. Commercial book cloth, title and images stencilled with acrylic paint (I used a site to generate colouring book pages to turn the pied piper image into an outline to stencil), and endpapers are from a scrap pack a friend sent me, picked because they remind me of something you'd see in a kids' fairy tale collection.

Also, I got the sneaky glee of making something for a friend who didn't know I'd picked her typeset. (She was only the one who recommended the podcast to me, after all!)

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Renegade Loves Fic (Writers) Stats 2024

Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day or FFWAD (August 21st) is an annual appreciation of fanfiction writers and the gifts that they give to fandom. To show our appreciation, we ran a binding event where binders on our Renegade Discord server chose a fic to make a physical copy of. This was all to say thank you to the author for the work that they put into making it.

Here’s onto the stats for this year’s event!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

The Dragon by Mairead Triste and Aristide

My final book of Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day! The Dragon by @the-cimmerians is a casefic horror slashfic (the m/m kind... but really, a bit of both) circa 1999, for the TV show The Sentinel, the origin of the Sentinel/Guide trope in fanfic.

In the late nineties, Sentinel was one of the ubiquitous slash fandoms, up there with due South, X-Files, and Highlander. I fully admit I have only ever seen the pilot and some fanvids, but I absorbed SO much canon and fanon from fic over the years.

At one point, I swear I had a printed, coil bound copy of The Dragon (like the one at the end of this post about Ghosts by Torch) so of course it needed to make its way onto my to-bind list. Gay pining, eventually requited! A serial killer! Folklore monsters!

This was a fun one to play around with some of the visual elements. Black and red and silver for the cover, and I am not sad that the edges got a bit drippy with the splattering. The endpapers are red lokta paper and I went through some contortions with trimming to keep the raw edges on the paper, for the VIBES. The batwing motif fits in with the folklore, and the handprints fit a very specific scene in the story. (THAT one. The under the bed one.) Plus, teeth.

I'm pretty happy overall with how it all came together, and fit with the overall mood and themes of the fic, and with being able to share some older fic and fandoms.

Happy FFWAD, Aristide!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

How Ray Got His Groove Back by Aristide and Bone, due South, Fraser/RayK

A quintessential due South RayK fic and a classic of the fandom for a reason! I knew when I started this whole crazy adventure of binding fanfic that I wanted to make hard copies of things across the fandoms that have been a part of over the years, and due South will always have a special place in my heart, since that's where I met my wife.

I'm to be able to share this fanbind with @the-cimmerians just in time for Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day! (And thanks to @renegadeguild for encouraging us all to share with the authors we love this day in particular.)

The title of How Ray Got His Groove Back is a riff on the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and the fic even has its own fanlore page. Because it was imported into AO3 from another archive as part of an Open Doors initiative, you too can enjoy some genuine vintage formatting as part of the reading experience! (Get your pre-AO3 mailing list flashbacks right here...)

The spine is Duo magpie bookcloth, and marbled paper found by chance in a household gift shop last winter (I wish they'd restocked it!), and the lettering is stencilled acrylic paint.

I leaned into the romance novel vibe for the typesetting, using the notorious yellow paper of the great paper misorder of 2023 for an aged paperback vibe, and a flowery frame for the cover. Gelli-plate printed endpapers, and a hand-sewn double-core endband in hot pink and purple thread to match.

And about that marbled paper and the stencilled title... this was the book where I discovered that the other paper I had stencilled on with no problems (mulberry fibre Lokta paper, it's lovely) is the exception rather than the rule, and some emergency repairs were needed when the stencil vinyl started to pull up the paper. I did my best with some paint and a fine-tipped maker and a pencil, but hoo boy. We won't be trying that again with this paper.

I'm glad to have this piece of personal fandom history, and also to say, happy Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day, Aristide & Bone!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Today is Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day (FFWAD), and @renegadeguild loves fic! To commemorate the day, we gift authors with handbound copies of their fic. As I posted earlier, I just kind of rolled a belated Christmas present for @zulufic into gifting it to her to match FFWAD's approximate date... but what better occasion to also do some bonus pamphlet binds of a few of her shorter fic? Pamphlet binding! A cardstock cover, a tiny bit of punching and sewing, and you're done! They are the equivalent of bite-sized, and I love them.

All three of these are A League Of Their Own fic. First up, Country Fair, a sweet little bit of canon-era romance.

Followed by a canon-divergent five plus one fic, Five Times Carson & Lupe Were Bros (And One Time Carson Was Lupe’s Wingman)

And finally, a little half-sized ficlet! A Glimpse of A Higher Life is a modern AU that's a classic meet-cute, where Greta and Carson both have a cat... the same cat. I HAD to bind this one, since Zulu had borrowed, in passing reference, an IRL architectural cat containment strategy from me for this one.

Happy FFWAD, Zulu! I am so lucky to have a long, multi-fandom, multi-year friendship with you online and off.

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

There's No Such Thing in the World (As An Undo Button) by Zulu

Before there was omegaverse, there was mpreg, a trope where a male character finds themselves pregnant through whatever means, often with some hand-wavey fanfic magic. This chonky little quarto fic is rarepair mpreg crackfic for the early 2000's medical drama House MD, with the pairing of House/Foreman.

Here we have the copy I made @zulufic, and the one I made for myself, fraternal copies due to limited materials in the same pattern. (I did not think I'd ever find a use for the bits of baby quilt patterned fabric in the fabric scraps I got from a coworker a few years ago, but lo and behold...)

So, this started out as a Christmas present for @zulufic. Come time for the exchange of gifts, I presented her with... a textblock! I had the pages printed and sewn, but not cased in. Eventually, it gained a hardcover case and became a finished book, but circumstances lined up just right such that I would be seeing her in August and able to put the book in her hands right within a few days of Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day, and participate in @renegadeguild's annual initiative to gift an author with their book for the day.

The lettering on the case is acrylic paint, applied with a Cricut-cut stencil. Hand-sewn endbands, decorated edges just for fun. One book has gelli-plate printed endpapers from my wife's art stash, the other has some Japanese paper of unknown provenance out of my paper stash.

This is the fic that sat on my to-bind list labelled "I like them all, she says unhelpfully," due to a stealth conversation with Zulu's wife to attempt to find her favourite fic. (The answer: whatever fic she's currently working on.) So I picked one I remember fondly from when it was first posted. Things that never made it into the author's notes and only obliquely into the AO3 tags: Zulu says this is actually an AU of the move Knocked Up.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and I'm glad I decided to do it as a half-sized quarto. A cute little chonk of a book for a cute (if delightfully cracktastic story! Happy Fanfic Writers' Appreciation Day, Zulu!

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Sudden Nature by everbrighter

This MDZS fic/series is a modern AU that's mostly without magic... except there's a heavenly bureaucracy. And every once in a while, it makes a mistake, and sends someone who's died back to earth. This is rare, but frequent enough that hospitals have resurrection wards just in case.

If you're at all familiar with canon, I think we can all see where this is going.

Wei Ying is a a whistleblower on the Wen Corporation in this one, who's adopted baby A-Yuan. When he's killed in an accident, Lan Zhan raises Lan Yuan and lives with his grief... and then Wei Ying comes back. This is a story that's emotional and heartfelt, and very funny in bits, about grief and loss and family, and getting something back you never thought you would, much like canon.

The series is a bunch of interconnected short fic with two long segments. The first one is from one from Lan Sizhui's point of view: "Lan Yuan has lived most of his sixteen years not knowing the man who raised him as a toddler. So when Wei Ying suddenly comes back to life, both Lan Yuan and his dad, Lan Zhan, work to make room in their lives for him. Too bad he has a science project due this week..."

The second one is from Wei Ying's: "Wei Ying comes back from the dead, all of a sudden. Over the course of a week, he remembers what it is to be alive, and what it is to be in love." (Not gonna lie, I kind of love the parts where Wei Ying is adjusting to no longer having the body of a twenty year old, in terms of sleeping for a week on the couch now has CONSEQUENCES.)

But it was the very first part of the series that hooked me, where Lan Zhan falls in love. And it's not who you think.

"Aren’t there classes for this? Aren’t there books a person is supposed to read for this? Should he have done research? Shouldn’t he have prepared? But ah, it’s too late now, and there’s a baby in his arms, face to the shoulder of Lan Zhan’s cable-knit sweater."

I finished the typeset for this fic back in the fall of 2022, and it was in my pile of text blocks to finish binding for Binderary, an annual fanbinding challenge, in February, 2023. It was the last one left. I looked at the text block. I looked at my bookcloth and paper options for the cover. I pulled out two options... and couldn't decide. It turns out, I just didn't have the right combination of colours.

In the interim, I obtained some Duo book cloth, a particular line that has a two-tone colour shift to it, gorgeous in person, but really hard to photograph. The company that makes it, sadly, has gone out of business, and the final group orders for it obtained near epic status among @renegadeguild circles. (It has its own lore. And fic.)

Which is to say, the spine of this book is Duo Dragonfly, and the cover is chiyogami paper. The endbands were my first time trying a double core, in sewing thread, and are a little bit shaky as a result, though I'm pretty happy with the colour combo. Lettering stencilled in gold acrylic paint.

I was going for an ethereal, heavenly feel with the title page, and a shout out to the Toronto setting with the spread on the table of contents. (Hello, fellow Canadians!)

A few interior shots here, and a vaguely Lan cloud used for the section breaks. I did a bit of formatting to mimic a newspaper column for the article that starts off "Thirty-Seven," the long section from Wei Ying's point of view.

I am pretty happy with how it turned out, and glad I held off to get the match that felt right for the cover materials!

And behind the cut for spoilers... the last sentence in the short chapter right before Wei Ying's death gets me RIGHT IN THE FEELS every single time I read it.

Lan Zhan held onto A-Yuan! He held him for fifteen minutes, and then for the next sixteen years it took for Wei Ying to come back from getting milk at the 7-11! Oh my heart. Nnngh.

(Also, I slid in a fan art illustration for the fic from GreenTeaPikachu, so enjoy the drunk!LanZhan Does Parkour as an added bonus for clicking through!)