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Rounin Kaoru: Tokyo & Kyoto Arc by Dragonsdaughter (Rurouni Kenshin)(inc)

Bought and Sold by Tevinter of our Discontent (Dragon Age)(inc)

Name a Thing, and You Own a Piece of it by FormerlyIR (Dune)(complete)

This is a trio of fics that were so small and two were incomplete but I wanted to see how thin I could bind a paperback. I wanted to bind in fandoms that I never really see to often. So Kenshin, Dune, and Dragon Age II it is. This was a fun project and I want to do something like this in the future.

Typesets and Covers done by Me

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So, several long long long months ago, I promised a certain fanfic author to bind their fic when they finished it. Now, it's a hefty fic and I've never done book binding before, so it's a little daunting. And with the fic being split with a time-skip, I decided it might be more feasible to put it into two books. Life is hectic and busy but I wanted to share what I have to build this magnificent book, Somewhere, Sometime by IGOM.

I don't like gutting real books for any sort of reason but this needed a hard cover. I thought I'd just go to Walmart and get one of those nice leather looking journals. Simple, but sleek. I could design a jacket to make it fancier. But! I found this.

You can slightly see the texture on this thing. It's so shiny and lovely. And it was just there in my local coffee shop. The pages have this slight pattern that I know won't translate once I print out the fic, but I thought I'd bind it then use some spray paint or something to get something like this. Will have to test before placing in book, of course.

Then the front and back have these nice, solid brown pages and I do love the elastic to keep it together, as well as the ribbon. Those stay. Pretty sure I have to gut them but they will be returned in the finished product. There is also a little envelope, folder piece but I don't know how attached to that part I am.

And for those curious, the little blurb on the back.

I followed the barcode by accident but it brought me to the company that made this and lemme tell you, if this works out, I will be spoiled for options for the second part.

Depending on how the second part goes, I'm thinking either the Wildflower Song, Layla, or Iron Horse. I want the designs to be similar but not identical. (Also, if anyone wanted them, here.)

This is what I've got so far as the current title page. I think it looks decent.

Looking again, this journal does only have 144 pages and my current document for the formatting has the fic at 762 pages. I may need to put it into multiple different books. Maybe this one is just the Jeralt in Almyra arc.

...Yes, I think that would be fun. We'll see how this goes.

Does it look better with the "Part 1" under or over the author name?

And finally, at the moment what the pages look like.

The pink line will have to be changed but I haven't yet figured out what I pushed to make it pink.

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Love all this.

I wasn't satisfied with the gag on Catharsis so I decided maybe I needed more room to work. So I wrote this great book (Maybe you've heard of it?) and carved out room for a box.

My initial thought was to use mirror vinyl to wrap the chipboards but that shit doesn't take a corner at all. So I moved up in price and toxicity to mirrored acrylic sheets. Which of course needed to, itself, be mirrored on its obverse- so the vinyl did reappear. That yielded this.

The cover was very sparse- because, you know, it was about the inset- but the placement needed to be exacting. Thusly, as I was prioritizing the face, the spine and the back got cattywampus.

I also had this worry if I set the endpaper right to the edge of the cutout, it would overly darken the inset. So I cut an interior mirror for the front cover. That was probably silly. And I hate how it looks. But dot dot dot.

Also I bought some foil to maybe do the edges but I liked the garbage streaky look so much, I failed to investigate further. Some day, I suppose.

It's a shame I still didn't get what I wanted, vis á vis the hall-of-mirrors thing, but I was growing increasingly worried I'd need to get into lighting and wiring and dear god, Dear God. I'm not emotionally ready to plug in a book quite yet.

Edit: I just noticed I didn't add a Read More and/or make this a tidy visual experience. That must be tough.

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subscribing to a fic isn’t enough I need the author to blast a bat signal into the night sky whenever they update

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This is awesome

My (second) bookbinding of Daemon’s Handbook ✅

I made my first ever bookbinding last summer, also of Daemon’s Handbook. Then I got Matt Smith’s autograph at NYCC on a dust jacket that I made for the first bind, and I realized I needed to do justice to that amazing autograph.

I knew I wanted:

A cover that looks like dragon scales

Sprayed edges

High Valyrian galore

Medieval marginalia-inspired illustrations

It took me a while to figure out all these techniques! I was lucky to find an embossed alligator skin that looked dragonish (and came in red for Caraxes). That was the easy part.

The most-time consuming part was my 634 day Duolingo streak for High Valyrian, so I would have enough knowledge of HV to attempt a translation. I used a lot of resources by @dedalvs to a) translate the fic title and b) write it in HV glyphs. The sprayed edges were done with my newfangled airbrush and some stencils. Red and black for House Targ, of course. The dragon on the bookmark charm has four legs instead of GRRM’s preferred two, but not everything can be perfect. 🥲

I previously talked about the endpapers in this post.

The good artwork inside the book is by @lucife56 (title page full spread) and @mariascorzelliart (fold-out with the Targbros and Velargirls in the back). The funky little Daemon doodles are by me. 🤡 The idea is that Daemon, being the author of this book, is scribbling and doodling on various pages with his commentary. So if the doodles are low quality, blame it on Daemon. (Joff also manages some vandalism on one of the pages).

Tumblr only lets me share 10 photos at a time so I can’t show the sections of the book that include Weekend Activity Guide for Witchy Children and my commentary about the Handbook. Because I was designing the book to fit the dust jacket (rather than the other way around), I had to get creative with the page count in my new typeset. Thus, the book ended up getting some fun bonus content beyond the Handbook.

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This is lovely 🥰

Songs of Love and Death ♥️☠️🗡️

Edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois

Features stories by Neil Gaiman, Jim Butcher, Jacqueline Carey, Diana Gabaldon, Majorie M. Liu, Carrie Vaughn, and many more.

My process video - PART 2 (on IG)

Try to check out PART 1, if you missed it.

📚📖

My cover designs for this book can be found HERE.

And here’s the finished product!

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This is my third time binding By Any Other Name by Deviant Nature this is the third time I am binding this fic. I don’t know if that’s a problem or not. But I wanted to try a bible bind. I have a handful of influences from this bind Sonia Andreia from the AFB FB group and NKbindery for her influence of the Gustov Dore illustration ideas. It took me months to do this typeset but it is my ode to this beautiful fic. I’ve been reading it for years .

This is my first time showing me making a paperback though. They are super easy and I love them so much.

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A exchange with a fellow binder TSPbinery in Instagram. She made a rebind of my favorite book childhood Alanna by Tamora Pierce. I love this one so much it’s beautiful. I made her a copy of Tales from the house of the Moon. This one was so fun and I can’t wait to do it again.

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@ gaurav

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More of my bible bind typesetting. I was having the hardest time finding tutorials on bible typography. I want my typeset to look good. So I have taken a bunch from other people and made a short setting video on typesetting a text that’s for a bible bind. This is for small print my original page count is something like 1000+ pages so this cuts it down to like 400 so that’s great. But feel free to adjust the columns to your liking.

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So a little help with trimming text blocks. I inserted thin pieces of scarp chipboard throughout the text. And when I trimmed the edges it didn’t come out messed up. It’s not completely straight but it’s the best as is gonna get with me . Thought I would share here for anyone that fights with their Guillotine on the daily.

[jaybinds]

So a little help with trimming text blocks. I inserted thin pieces of scarp chipboard throughout the text. And when I trimmed the edges it didn’t come out messed up. It’s not completely straight but it’s the best as is gonna get with me . Thought I would share here for anyone that fights with their Guillotine on the daily.

[jaybinds]

Listen to your elders

So last week I posted abut the importance of downloading your fic. And then three days later AO3 went down for 24 hours. No one was more weirded out by this than I was. But while y’all were acting like the library at Alexandria was on fire I was reading my download fic and editing chapter eight of Buck, Rogers, and the 21st Century. And also thinking about what I could do to be helpful when the crisis was actually over.

So first off, I’m going to repeat that if you’re going to bookmark a fic, you really need to also download the fic and back it up in a safe place. I just do it automatically now and it’s a good habit to get into.

But let’s talk about some other scenarios. Last October I lost power for over a week after hurricane Ian. Apart from not having internet or A/C I did find plenty to do, I collect books so I had plenty to read, but maybe, unlike me, your favorite comfort reads aren’t sitting on a bookshelf. So let’s do something about that, shall we?

In olden times many long years ago around 1995 we printed off a lot of fic. It was mostly SOP to print a fic you planned to reread and stick it in a three ring binder. And that’s totally valid today too, but you can also make a very nice paperback with a minimum amount of skill and materials.

Let’s start with the download; Go to Ao3 and select your fic, we’ll be working with one of mine. This method works best with one shots, long fic tends to need a more complicated approach. Get yourself an HTML download

Open up the HTML download and select all then copy paste into any word processor. Set the page to landscape and two columns, then change the font to something you find easy to read, this is your book, no judgement. This is all you have to do for layout but I like to play a little bit. I move all the meta, summary, notes to the end and pick out a fun font for the title: 

No time like the present to do a quick proofread. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first typeset. On to the fun part.

Now you’re going to need some materials:  8.5x11in paper ruler one sheet of 12x12 medium card stock (60-80lb) scissors pencil pen or fine tip marker sheet of wax paper white glue two binder clips 2 heavy books or 1 brick butter knife

You’ll also need a printer, if you’re in the US there is almost a 100% chance your local library has a printer you can use if you don’t have your own. None of these materials are expensive and you can literally use cheap copy paper and Elmers glue.

Print your text block, one page per side. Fold the first page in half so that the blank side is inside and the printed side out:

use the butter knife to crease the edge. Repeat on all the sheets. When you’ve finished, stack them up with the raw edge on the left and the folded edge on the right. I used standard copy paper, because you’re only printing on one side there’s no bleed to worry about. Take the text block and line everything up. Use the binder clips to hold the raw edge in place.

Wrap the text block in the wax paper so that the raw edge and binder clips are facing out. I’m going to use my home built book press but you don’t need one, a brick or a couple of books or anything else heavy will work fine.

Once the text block is anchored down, take off he binder clips and get out the glue.

You can use a brush but you don’t need one, smear some glue on that raw edge.

Go make a margarita, watch The Mandalorian, call your mother. Don’t come back for at least an hour

In an hour smear some more glue on there and shift your brick forward so that the whole book is covered. This keeps the paper from warping. While glue part 2 is drying we’ll do the cover. Get out your 12x12 cardstock

Mark the cardstock off at 8.5 inches and cut it. Measure in 5.5 inches from the left and put in a score line with the butter knife (the back edge not the sharp edge)

Carefully fold the score line, this is your front cover. You have some options for the cover title, you can use a cutting machine like a cricut if you have one, you can print out a title on the computer and use carbon paper to transfer the text to the cardstock. I was in a mood so I just freehanded that beoch. Pencil first then in pen.

Take your text block out from under your brick. Line it up against the score mark and mark the second score on the other side of the spine

Fold the score and glue the textblock into the cover at the spine. Once the glue dries up mark the back cover with the pencil and then trim the back cover to fit with your scissors.

Voila:

I’m going to put this baby on the shelf next to the Silmarillion.

The whole process, not counting drying time, took less than an hour.

If you want to make a book of a longer fic, I recommend Renegade Publishing, they have a ton of resources for fan-binders. 

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