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IT'S DAY TWO!!!!

WE HAVE ARRIVED AND NOW ITS TIME TO CHOW DOWN ON FICS IN THAT NEW FANDOM YOU'VE BEEN EYEING!!! AS ALWAYS REMEMBER TO JUST LEAVE A COMMENT!!!

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Bound: Nothing Gold Can Stay by @moonflower-rose

Typeset, bind, and illustrations by: me, @phoenixortheflame.

One summer evening, Harry Potter vanished in the middle of dinner with his friends. Four days later he came back. Sort of. Draco Malfoy is on the case.

Well that got out of hand.

So — I planned to bind this for myself and then another for the author. But then, I had to make one for @reveriepi whose recording lulls me to sleep so very often. And one for @sits-bound because she’s a good girl who deserves good things. And of course one for @maleekamolscreates because the fic begins ON OUR BIRTHDAY!

Anyway, paperbacks are dope. Made using the double-fan method. I think I have the process fully memorized now, but if you're interested in learning how, I highly recommend checking out Mally's video on it, which I've watched a dozen times at least.

Cover is 48-lb glossy photo paper covered with soft-touch laminate. The inside cover design is printed directly onto the back of the photo paper and is not finished in any way.

Cover illustrations done by me in Procreate. Cover design done in Canva. Inside cover design as well as full-title page done in Affinity Designer; typeset done in Publisher.

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Brazil just had the biggest false flag "communist" terror attack since the military dictatorship lmao

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Spotlighting my dragon zines because they were two years in the making!!! When I first tried to get all my Big Dragon Feelings (zoology, spec bio, fantasy, gender, rage) on paper I got frustrated and shelved the project for a year. When I came back to it I thought "This is okay actually but it's still missing something." A year after that I drafted a whole new zine that was more of a short autobiographical essay. Then I rewrote bits of the original zine (which is more of a poem) and suddenly they worked as a pair. The Reality of Dragons is illustrated with historical public domain images and The Reality of Dragons: A History features photos I took of my own dragon collection (plus one Albrecht Dürer artwork). I wanted to present my toys with the gravitas of museum pieces in a completely sincere way. When this run sells out I might reprint them as a double-sided stapled zine because folding minis is actually murder on my bad shoulder /:

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The last touch on Narcissus and a memory of gold.

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The Taiwanese Special Edition Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint cover is so cute! The colors are really blending in very nicely

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Batmuppet Chapter One: The Rainbow Connection

“It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight!�� The manor ought to have been silent as the grave when Bruce returned, so it caught him by surprise when he heard a familiar jingle drifting through the empty halls. He paused at the foot of the grand staircase, head tilted to the side as he listened to the Muppet Show theme song jangling away happily. It sounded like it was coming from the first floor, which meant the most likely origin was Dick's bedroom. Which would be fine, if it also wasn't almost three am... [Keep reading on Ao3]

What do you do when you come home late and find the orphan you've taken guardianship of is crying alone in his room watching the Muppets?

You sit your brooding ass down and join him.

And if you later end up on a talk show with said Muppets and end up embroiled in a running gag about your playboy persona being in a throuple with Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, well, it's not like anyone's ever going to believe you're Batman now...

Based on the Tumblr shitpost.

***

Listen, I had no intention of posting this until I finished the whole thing, which is now about 70k worth of words in my drafts. But I'm going to be so real right now, I need to feel a shred of happiness right now, or I'm going to break, so you get to read BatMuppet in installments, and I get dopamine from completing tasks. Sound fair?

Cool. Thank you for reading and commenting if you do <3 I'll just be over here in the corner playing with my favorite blorbos until things stop happening to me.

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I feel like Bruce Wayne projects the kind of amiable playboy 'fun' vibe that he'd be the type of celebrity that certain interviewers feel comfortable surprising with puppies.

You know the kind of shows I mean.

The late-night talk show situations where they're making benign small talk with their smiling guest, and there's a segment where animals get brought out, usually to talk about some sort of ecological relief effort.

So you're watching your trash TV talk show late at night, and you get to watch billionaire pretty boy Bruce Wayne be begrudgingly talked into holding a (relatively) harmless creature which inevitably gets a lot of delighted shrieks from the audience as it starts being a lot more active than the handler promised. And to his credit, Bruce doesn't flinch, he doesn't freak out. But his eyes are a little wide, and his voice a little tight as the smile on his face takes on a slight rictus quality before he's inevitably rescued by an apologetic handler who is also laughing because they all know there was no real danger, it was just funny to put Bruce, who is an undeniable good sport and already laughing along, out of his comfort zone for the sake of charity.

Meanwhile, up in the Justice League headquarters, several founding members of the League are wondering how fast they can get a fake Oscar award shipped to the space station because fuck off. Absolutely fuck off, Bruce. Where the fuck did he study? Juilliard? (Probably.)

(Clark ends up going to a novelty store during the commercial break. It's faster than trying to get anything shipped, even with the infrastructure Bats built for them. He finds it several days later taped to his console in a conspicuously empty briefing room. It's gaudy and awful, the words "Best Actor" engraved on the plaque. No one's around to see him smile. No one comments when it vanishes. Everyone thinks it's been yeeted out an airlock. Dick absolutely comments when it shows up in the manor, stashed in one of the trophy cases that sprung up for all the bat kids' school awards. Bruce has no idea how it got there. Must have been Alfred. (It was not.))

Anyway, consider, for your amusement, Bruce Wayne getting highjacked on The Gotham Toight Show with a handful of wriggling puppies and, for a split second, not having to pretend he's delighted to be there.

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Fixing and endpaper accident

Yeah, who doesn't know it. You finished casing in, all dried nicely. Then endpapers are square and don't have skew or a wrinkle and when you take out the moisture barrier, turns out you damaged the endpaper a tiny bit, glue seeped in and you tear off some paper there.

Not a big deal with coloured through, papers without a pattern. You just clean it out, smooth the rough paper a bit down and you're good.

It's a different thing with patterned papers like mine here. In this case I was lucky, the pattern was not a complex one and on top the torn off piece was large enough to carefully peel away and just glue into place. There was a tiny bit of the pattern lost and my gaze kept stopping there. I just could not unsee it. So I checked my pens to see if I had a blue pen that was close enough to the colour of the pattern (I did) and carefully recreated the pattern with it.

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Portrait of an elderly couple in traditional kimono.  Photo taken during the 1890’s, Japan, by photographer Kazumasa Ogawa 

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Now that all three copies have made their way to the recipients, it's time to post pictures of my first end-to-end book bind!

These are copies of @robotmango's delightful Word of Honor novella, 'The wild geese.' Featuring arranged-ish marriage, Feral Gremlin Accidentally Falls For Husband, and really more self-mutilation than you might think for what's essentially a love story about finding freedom. I've loved this fic for a long time, and when I saw @rainsfalling's gorgeous typeset (mountain chapter headers! and scene breaks!) for @renegadeguild's Tiny Books Bang I was overcome with covetous glee >:D

...of course, then I had to actually print the thing, which took four separate goes around the Brother tech support phone line and a whole replacement printer, BUT! printer nemesis defeated, the bookmaking itself was a delight! This was my first time working with textblocks all the way up from a flat page to a book, and I was right, the sewing is the best bit. Naked unglued textblocks are extremely wobbly, though, and this is also very cute.

Another piece of technology conquered: my Silhouette Cameo vinyl printer (cutter?), scavenged from the ruins of Joann's demise and put hard to work cutting out so many tiny geese and mountain ranges. (Weeding is also very fun. Slightly less than sewing! But only because sometimes you lose pieces and have to swear about it.) Cover design remains a mystery, so I mostly copied @rainsfalling's interior design work ^.^;

One thing I knew I wanted was to make these three - one each for Rainsfalling and Orange and one for me to keep - to be sisters, not triplets. I got to try out faux double-core endbands at the Renegade Bindery retreat, and so swapping out a single colour in the endbands (and using different ribbons) seemed like a good way to change things up without making a ton more work for myself! (Pro tip, though: do not flirt with Thread Chicken while making end bands. It is very hard to keep an even tension with only two inches of tail!!!)

All in all, I'm extremely happy with these as my first full project, & I feel like I learned a ton. (Much thanks to all the Renegade folks, particularly @runawaymarbles for letting me come over & slicing chunks off of these with her guillotine, without which the edges would be a far more jagged affair.) They're real! They open! You can read them like real books! I... have already typeset & am partway through making three more octavo projects ^.^;

Soon my shelves will be overwhelmed with tiny fic binds and you know what? I'm okay with that.

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I’m not very good at keeping up with this blog 😂

Moving right along, in no particular order, today we’re looking at my not quite cursed but slightly uncooperative bind of Shatter Together by @thepartyresponsible

It’s actually a 4-part series that follows a ‘what if’ timeline AU where young, broke, but still deadly Clint Barton runs into post-resurrection Jason Todd.

And somehow they hit it off.

This is a love story y’all

Anyway it’s bound in Verona ‘Smoke’, and the endpapers are batik ‘stone’. I typeset it in Affinity as usual, and made my very first table of contents! @sammialex helped me add color to my SVGs. The font on the cover is double-layered with a metallic maroon underneath black foil, and the skyline is plain grey HTV.

Also hey TPR - if you want a copy, hit me up!

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its extremely important to read widely and deeply in a variety of genres. read obscure self published shit that only 4 people have read. read culturally relevant works of literature that have helped shape the canon. read horror. read women's lit. read historical fiction and comedies and nonfiction and hentai and poetry and science fiction and fantasy and mysteries and romance and good things and bad things and things u hate and things you love and things you COULD like if only the author changed x y and z and things which are beautiful but not meant for you.

doing all of this reading will lay a groundwork of rich complexity in your heart. so that you can write really good porn

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Here’s an opportunity learn book repair…virtually!

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Pet Sematary by Stephen King

My brother in law is a huge fan of Stephen King, and the last time I was over I noticed his copy of Pet Sematary was getting a bit ragged. So for his birthday, he’s getting a rebound copy!

I’m a bit addicted to this red neon slub bookcloth. The decorations are HTV.

Also, I’m in the process of working with a bunch of Renegade bookbinders to custom order a large quantity of @renato-crepaldi ‘s gorgeous marbled papers, so I decided it was time to use up part of my existing stash.

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The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

I am quite happy with this typeset and since the text is in the public domain I've decided to share it! I think it's good. It's in A5 size, feel free to do whatever you absolutely want with it. Assorted thoughts under the cut as usual.

Typesetting this was a blast. The excerpt from the play at the start of The Mask is my favorite of it all, I think that page looks really good. One change I made to the original text is that I went with the more... academic, maybe? approach of italicizing any mention of the play's name instead of having it in quotation marks - the original work also italicizes the names of newspapers so it only felt fair to do it to the play, too.

And yes, I only did the first four stories. I have to admit I've never managed to read the nonbe-King-ed stories in this collection.

This was my first time attempting to print on bookcloth. I only have access to a DinA4 black and white laser printer so my options were relatively limited - I decided to use a nice yellow bookcloth to offset the lack of color in the cover image, and designed the image specifically in black and white for this very purpose. Due to the size constraint I decided to do a sort of three piece bind, with the covers being seperate pieces from the spine material. I could've decorated the back too with this method but honestly every time I fed bookcloth through this paper printer was nervewracking (even though thankfully it all turned out perfectly fine) so I just left the backs blank as with all of my other binds so far.

This was also my first time stamping individual letters on leather. It went... okay. I accidentally stamped the "O" in "yellow" so hard it cut through the leather - and then I liked that effect so much I cut the O out of the other copy on purpose. Not wanting to buy more specialized paints left me with rather limited options to fill the letters in. I ended up wiping them down with white fabric paint designed for (linocut, etc.) printing, then painting over the excess white with black leather paint. End result: not perfect, but passable for what it is.

I bound two copies of this, one of which I was planning to give to the free little library around the corner. Unfortunately I somehow managed to make the front cover of one of the binds half a centimeter too short. I have no idea how the hell I accomplished that. The defect is large enough that the text block is partially exposed from the front when the book is closed, which I feel like makes the text block too vulnerable to be put into strangers' hands so it'll just have to live on my bookshelves instead. I guess I'm doing the public a service by not inflicting the terror of the King in Yellow upon them. It does really bum me out that this happened; I know this is just my fourth completed bookbinding projected and when compared to, like, my fourth ever drawing then all things considered it's not only pretty good but also completely understandable that I would make some sort of silly mistake, but still. Ugh. Trying not to beat myself up too hard about it.

The cover image was adapted from an illustration by W. Heath Robinson, with an assortment of other public domain work used alongside it. The title page is an illustration by Ephraim Moshe Lilien with added parts from an illustration by Charles Augustus. My source for the text was Wikisource, which transcribed an 1895 edition. The endpapers are a majestic blue Italian carta varese - I chose blue as a color contrast to all the yellow.

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Do Every Stupid Thing (Version 2)

Not too exciting because you've already seen an almost-identical one, but I gave my first copy to my fandom bestie @kangofu-cb, so this copy of Do Every Stupid Thing is either for me or for @thepartyresponsible if they want it and I'll make myself another! I changed the somewhat art-deco corners on the first copy to just a plain rectangular border, which somehow is MUCH harder in the Cricut Design Space program. Amazing typeset by @runawaymarbles. Gold and red Indian foil endpapers to evoke Tony's eventual Iron Man persona. :-) Gunmetal bookcloth, and about every HTV I could find in its shiniest version. :-D Layering HTVs of different colors in an interlocking design is a nightmare, but I have no regrets because the design element (from the title page of runawaymarbles' typeset) was gorgeous, incorporating all of their signature colors. The quote from the fic says, "Don't let 'em break your heart. That small one's kinda flashy."