#fanbind

[nocturnus33]

"Book binders are making fanfiction physical, so it can sit alongside the authorized tales"

[mothdogsart]

I pulled my latest bind out of the book press today! This is Slow Show by @mia-ugly. It’s my absolute favorite Good Omens fic I’ve ever read and I really enjoyed the process of typesetting it and designing the cover. I included the original bookcover created by @dorywhynot inside as homage to the Ineffable Editions version.

Technical details follow:

The cover design repeatedly beat my ass, but I think it turned out okay in the end! I drew Az’s hand in Procreate and imported it into Canva. I’ve a mind to cut out the coin shape in gold vinyl and add it in later.

This was my first time trying to hand-trim a text block, and it was… bad. I had to sand for a long time and gave up doing the tops and bottoms of the pages. So the text block is technically only a third finished 😅 Next time I hand trim I’ll have to use a thicker, sharper blade for sure.

I’m so pleased with the endpaper from Hollander’s. The colors are really vivid and it’s got a lovely matte feel.

Overall I’m really proud of this bind. The dark green bookcloth really came together with the blue and black and cream. 🤩

Tumblr mobile isn’t letting me paste the fic link, but it can be read on AO3.

❗️My binds are not for sale. Authors and artists may enquire about gift copies.❗️

[getfuckedblr]

latest bind!! if we were lovers by @reggieblk

i read this over christmas and was OBSESSED like was sneaking off to read it during family time obsessed. she came in at like 700 pages and i had to physically wedge her into my guillotine for trimming, but i’m so proud of her!! the covers didn’t come out perfect (but then they never do LMAO) but i’m pretty satisfied!!

bound in peel and stick green flocking, gilded with bronze toner foil and gold htv for the cover!

[theriverbeyond]

The Process Of Elimination, by zoicite/ @enechelon

The Emperor calls for eligible heirs to compete for a chance to marry his treasured progeny, Her Divine Highness, First Born of the First Reborn. Each week one House will be sent home until only one remains and the winning heir shall ascend to stand beside Her Divine Highness, hand in hand, with House replenished and legacy secured. Harrow does not intend to compete.

or: THE bachelor AU!! This has been a longtime favorite fic of mine and it was such an honor to be able to bind it!! Sending out a massive thank you to the Zoicite for writing and sharing it with the world

Fandom: The Locked Tomb

Pairing: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus

Title font: Neue Helvetica Bold Extended

Body font: Garamond

Pages: 471

Case: Arrestox Bookcloth White with hand-embossed gold foil

Endpapers: French Marble Pastel Goldenrod

Progress pictures/process under the cut!

For the cover/title I went directly to the Bachelor logo for inspiration, replacing the classic wedding band with, of course, the ring of keys used in the fic!

The cover is heat embossed by hand, in the same way as my previous bind of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. For that bind I went pretty maximalist, and for THIS one I wanted to aim for a really clean looking, simple but elegant look. I think it turned out pretty good! I ended up going for the white and gold look to match First House Gideon vibes

I also tried rounding and backing here again, which turned out somewhat mixed. I'm still working on my technique for that, but peep the nice yellow headbands to match the endpapers!

Overall, this was SO fun to do, and a great excuse to revisit & spend good time with a fic I love.

[spagetthee]

My finished version of @perkynurples amazing fic Nothing Gold Can Stay. I had a lot of fun making this. There are some things I know I can do better so I'm excited to make even more fanbinds. The sequel and epilogue are currently in the typesetting stage so I won't have those done yet.

For this bind I use Heat Transfer Vinyl for the first time. It was a bit finicky but the result looks great. No more hand painting spines!!

I also tried toner reactive foil, which worked alright. I wish it would have adhered better but it did its purpose.

Overall I'm very pleased with this bind.

[glassbottlepress]

My most recent finished commission! A half-cover style with turquoise bookcloth along the spine and Stonehenge white cardstock 90lb for the covers.

I learned a lot of things working on this, and I'm glad to have worked on such a fun project for my first official commission! Thank you @dragonsorceress22, I hope you enjoy!

[etherati]

Another fanbind--still just my own fic, so I can experiment without worrying about doing poor service to someone else's work--and both my first quarto and my first quarterbind. This is still one of my favorite creations from my Watchmen era: The Widening Gyre, a really genuinely spooky ghost story with an extremely ambiguous ending. Only about 13,000 words, so a good small book.

Technical details below.

Text block is Adobe Garamond Pro on France French Parchtone in fleece white. Page headers are Traveling Typewriter and title page is Special Elite. Bird wingdings are from the font Birds of a Feather.

Endpages are just plain black Canson. Page edges trimmed with the chisel method and painted with Daler Rowney FW Pearlescent black acrylic ink. Headbands are premade, sorry, still not in that deep yet.

Spine in some generic black book cloth, covers in a natural fiber art paper I found at the local Guiry's, spattered with some red watercolor paint. Spine lettering done by hand with a Faber Castell pitt artist pen in white.

A lot of experimenting this time, really happy with the result.

[theliterarymess]

My bookbinding journey in pictures

[frogsandfries]

I know, I know, the end papers totally clash with the cover material.

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP Dry Heat/ Cold Rain/ Green Blade - altersuperego

Part I

More pictures and descriptions under the cut

New WIP that’s going to be a birthday gift so I’m not naming it properly just yet.

This post is a bit of a jumble, Sorry for that. I think I wrote quite a bit about some of my processes already though, so this one is partly about stuff I have not written about yet and partly about things particulary concerning this work.

After printing there was a lot going on that I wasn’t quite happy with. I am, however, even more happy with the result now as I might have been if the printing hadn’t required some adjustment. 

For example the pages following the title pages showed through much more than I liked, so I added black Satogami papers, which now also mark off different sections of the book. I cut the paper to size plus 3-5mm to have a small ledge to sew through (the ledge is glued down to make sewing easier and keep the paper in place).

This time there are a few pics of my sewing process.  I like to sew on Ramie band because it is so thin and can be easily spread out after moisturising so it barely shows after glueing the paste down down.

Historically entwining the thread while sewing the bookblock was done when books were not sewn on bands so those intersections connected the signatures and offered some more stability. Since the use of bands to sew on, it’s not really necessary anymore. I still like to entwine the sewing thread of the first and following and the last and previous signature to keep the thread firmly on the spine and my first and the outside signatures from slipping out too much when rounding the spine.

When guillotining the head and foot edge, I place the book on a cardboard an to protect the shoulders from getting squashed by the pressure of the guillotine (you can see another cardboard construction with one rounded edge on top of the bookblock). I also fill up the front edge (which was guillotined before rounding the bookblock) with some scrap paper or maculation to keep the uper pages from fraying. I think next time I’ll also cut the paper to fill the edge smooth so I have a smooth edge to line up against the side of the machine.

Even without a professional guillotine I can only recommend to fill out the front edge of rounded books for trimming the head and food edge. Knives are made to cut against surface and the results will always be neater with a surface to cut against, than pushing down on paper in mid air! 

[w1ng3dw01f]

Fellas, fellas

Why on earth are you BUYING PHYSICAL BOOKBOUND COPIES OF FANFICTION????

ACTUALLY WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOOKBINDING FANFICTION TO SELL?!?!?!

IF ANY OF YOU DO EITHER OF THESE THINGS, GET OUT!! I AM NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN.

In all seriousness though, authors on AO3 have begun to pull their works off of the site to avoid getting sued by people stealing their works to make a pretty bound book for profit. Entire accounts could be shut down as well.

Listen, I’m all for saving favorite works by printing them out and putting them in a binder, or learning how to make a bookbound copy yourself and/or assembling one with a pre-made and purchased fancy binding for a fanfic FOR YOURSELF or AS A GIFT to someone, but making bindings with and putting fanfiction in it TO SELL is where I draw the line.

Literally the entire point of AO3 is that you can read it FOR FREE.

It is DISRESPECTFUL for people to make money off of hardbound copies because guess what, the original creators of these fics get nothing. We are literally only writing fanfiction for our own pleasure.

Buying and selling book-bound fanfiction is also ILLEGAL YOU DUMB SHITS. People who are selling content while claiming to be a book binder is a misconception of their services. Book binders make the covers and all that, not the actual content of the book. Selling fanfiction is also an immediate violation of copyright law / Creative Commons licenses. The original fan work will get erased from the internet.

Fanfiction is already a legal grey zone since they are works being written about are protected by copyright. Copyright holders can in fact go after writers as well as the person who sold the fanfiction.

This also goes for people who steal fanart and, claim it as theirs, and put a price on it.

Don’t make it worse.

rest assured, we can still write our fanfics and make our art.

Buying a binding for you to assemble onto your own fanfiction or fanfiction you printed for PERSONAL USE is fine.

HOWEVER,

Bookbinding fanfiction for profit is literally ruining things for everyone. DON’T.

If I see any of them on Etsy, I swear to god-

[nocturnus33]

The meaning of mistletoe by Endrina, first volume of The secret language of plants. @llendrinall I have read this charming story several times. The voice of the narration, with its fairy tale reminiscence, is something I really like. Endrina is a great author, it is worth reading their novel length fics.

Typeset by Lindsey P. For those inexperienced in fandom, this story can be read for free at AO3.

What I like:

It's quite a simple binding, but something in it remind me of the old editions of my childhood. Reading it give me a special kind of joy, it's both, the comfort of this story and the childhood-like feeling this tome brings me while holding it

What I could do better:

I had problems with the guillotining of the edges, but went ahead [I had already lost a lot of material with a failed first printing]. I couldn't say what happened, but - for me - that mistake gives a Je ne sais quoi to the edition that I love. I don't know why, but when I was a child, back in the 70's, I had many books with the same feeling. The paper was a bit thicker than usual, and the edges weren't perfectly cut. I didn't realize, until I sat down to read this edition, that this binding conjures up memories of my childhood.

Special thanks: During the process, I had a severe case of printer hiccups (Or binder's brain hiccups, to be more precise) but @getfuckedblr hold my hand and helped me.

@llendrinall 

[If I learned to bind, you can do it too. It's not that difficult... ok a little at first, but it is doable. Don't buy fic binds, ok? It spoils fandom's fun]

[mothdogsart]

My fifth bind is complete! This is a collection of some of my absolute favorite short Good Omens fics (sub-20k words) which I sorted into rough thematic categories. This book features works by @thehoyden and @darcylindbergh (among others who I don’t think are on Tumblr) as well as a cover image graciously provided by @adealiz ♥️

Technical details follow:

This was my first time working with this specific paper (which I cut to the correct grain direction! What a delight!) as well as my first time using hand-marbled endpaper (as opposed to printed scrapbook paper.) The endpaper was much thinner than what I’m used to, so I had a little unexpected glue moisture rippling.

I think I’ll be switching my fonts up going forward. I keep having issues getting Garamond to print consistently.

For the cover, I used a faux leather upholstery patch. I printed the cover image on printable vinyl and added some silver lettering stickers. It might not be the most durable/travelable thing ever, but it looks nice on the shelf.

I’m so happy to have this one done—the learning process never ends. I’m already typesetting my next two binds, another Good Omens fic and a Star Trek AU 😊

❗️These binds are not for sale. Authors and artists may inquire about gift copies.

[getfuckedblr]

little tiny baby book!!! bound in peel and stick velvet wallpaper and silver htv:)

[theriverbeyond]

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, by pipstrelle/ @neornithes

Endpaper art: Grody Maritime Necromancy by @iris-of-the-lambs

Being the journal of Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chronicling the journey of the Emperor's warship Cenotaph on its hunt to slay an immortal Resurrection Beast.

or: THE MOBY DICK AU!! This fic has been an all time favorite of mine for so long, I am so excited to finally have been able to bind it!

Title font: AquilineTwo

Body font: Garamond

333 pages

Faux leather cover (Skivertex) with hand-embossed gold foil

Progress pictures/process under the cut!

The concept behind this fanbind is based on this specific special edition of Moby Dick by the Easton Press:

I did a TON of things for the first time on this bind much of it largely by winging it.

making the hubs (bumps on the spine)

first time rounding and backing (ft secret other binding project I can't show yet) + printing it off in the library

installing the FANTASTIC endpaper art (SOOO nervewracking), plus a close up shot of how I got the center crease to land JUST to the left of Harrow's face, which I'm super proud of.

foiling for days!! using the Easton Press edition as a guide, I mocked up a cover in MS Paint, then printed it off so I could foil it down. my hand was cramping but it was SO worth it!

and finally some unboxing pictures from the lovely writer!! so happy it arrived home safe and sound

[spagetthee]

I know I said it would take awhile to finish this, but the recent comments on the last post were really encouraging. I really appreciate the wonderful things you guys had to say <3

So here it is! @perkynurples "For The Ages Of A Day" and "Autumns That There Were". I ended up binding the pair of them together because the epilogue is so short in comparison. I think it came out really well!

I had a lot of trouble with this fabric unfortunately. You can see that the fabric coloration is quite varied and it's very, very thin. Don't buy cloth from Amazon if you can help it lol.

If you want the typeset for yourself, you can find it here:

All of my typesets are available for personal use and are available on my Tumblr page. You can also request a typeset for free <33

To perkynurples:

Your series was and is one of my absolute favorite stories I've ever read. I had such a blast reading it and then rereading it again as I typeset and bound it together. NGCS holds a very special place in my heart. It was my first real endeavor into bagginshield and it's been such a pleasure reading the stories in that fandom. I hope you enjoy the typesets I sent you <3