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Bookbinding of Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu, Jan/Feb 2025.

Handmade custom copy of Carmilla using my typeset from the Renegade 2024 Tiny Books Bang! I made my own illustrations for this typeset, which was super fun, and you can find those in a separate post on my blog. Each of the four parts has a section illustration and different decorative margins, two of which you can see in the photos here. I used several pieces of butterfly imagery to reference Carmilla's line about girls being like caterpillars. There are several hidden critters in the margin illustrations. The title page is probably my favorite.

I was weird enough in the chat to convince a friend to read this novella and they liked it a lot, so I bound this copy for them! This tiny book uses hooked endpapers, a historic style I have been trying to master, and this one turned out quite well. This style involves being able to see into the hinge of the book, and the endpapers are decorative, rather than structural. If you want to see the difference, check out a mass produced book with decorative paper in the front: there's a single folded sheet of paper on each end of the book that glues the textblock (stack of pages) to each cover. In my book here, that paper is not a single piece but instead two pieces, and the textblock is held on to the covers by its spine instead. I finally remembered to put in an oxford hollow, which allows the cover to flex properly instead of being glued directly to the spine.

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A tragedy in this from a queer perspective is that even if Carmilla was not a vampire here to turn Laura while sustaining on others, even if Laura's dreams were purely from her repressed desires and no biting, Laura was bound to get her heart broken. Eventually her darling friend would have to leave, and Laura is of marriageable age, to transition from being under a father's watch to be under a husband's. Carmilla would always need to sneak under a patriarch's nose regardless. A relationship between them or other women would almost be bound to stay in letters like a real 19th-century story Carmen Machado provided in the intro of the annotated version, of two women who ended up dying young. One of them describing her lover as "sunlight personified", and "She warmed me where I had only ever been cold. She took what was fallow and made it fruitful. I did not realise my soil was not salted."

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História de vida de toda garota:

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