Fanbinding - Blog Posts

Ok so I had some issues but it's turning out!! I'll do touch ups later but the cover is done!!!

Trying to design a fan binding cover...... Strong reminders onto why I'm not a graphic designer...

A bookbinding of Flashy Brotherhood by Airuna on AO3! Thank you so much for the permission, I'll have lot of fun w my personal copy!

@spiralwaves Progress update on the "In Imago Diaboli" fanbind!

After weeks struggling with the typeset (note to self: never think "ahh, this is going so easily!" during a creative project because. that's just asking for trouble 😅 ), I finally got it to print more-or-less nicely... ignoring the printer skew, lol. Ah well! We're out of the typesetting and into the fire, or something, heh.

My New Bind Gallery

Figured I would put together a gallery of images for all my bind projects and It's gonna be a constant work in progress but I've put this together!

Check It Out Here!

I still have to fill out captions for all the images, and I'm gonna be updating a lot of the pictures to get better lighting but I wanted to share this now cause I'm really proud of how the page is coming out!

It should work on mobile, but I'm still practicing making things cross-screen compatible.

Fanbinding: The Grinch Who Sold Christmas by @forineffablereasons

Anthony J. Crowley, a big-time attorney from London, is sent to small-town Tadfield to close a deal before Christmas that would sell out half of high street to a fancy developer and put him up for partner at his firm. The deal will run the local businesses out and change the landscape of the town forever, but that’s none of Crowley’s business; he’s just doing a job.

But as the town invites him to share in their lives, their hopes, and their holiday celebrations, and as the enigmatic Aziraphale invites him to share in something more, Crowley starts to wonder: if everything has its price, is he still willing to pay what this deal will cost?

Finally posting my other bind from the @renegadepublishing 2022 Exchange! This is "The Grinch Who Sold Christmas" a Good Omens Hallmark Christmas movie AU by darcylindbergh (@forineffablereasons). It was a gift for Lofe (@misanthropiczombie), and I had such a lovely time with it.

I had a lot of fun making this book! This is a three-piece bradel bind, with a spine done in arrestox and boards in ivory Italian cloth from Hollanders. I gave painting a full pattern onto the cloth to create the design (nervewracking on white cloth...), which is inspired by Aziraphale's Heaven's Gate tartan pattern from the show. Fore-edge is a gold alcohol ink sponged on. I had this chunky red and gold lace thread I wanted for the endbands for that touch of Crowley's colors. Since I was already painting in the drop caps for Royal Flush, I decided to paint these ones in as well!

I was very happy to be able to gift copies of this both to my giftee and the author! And I got to do my first Good Omens bind <3.

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here

Stargate SG-1 HANDMADE BOOK by WriteDragon

Hand-stitched and hand-bound book of my SG-1 fanfic (@lightspire on A03)

Finished binding another one! This is Desiderium, a fantastic re-imagining of AOT canon if Eren and Levi had joined the Survey Corps at the same time. Written by the wonderful @omnidirectionalmanoeuvregay! Gripping plot, the slooowest burn, hilarious voicing--everything about this fic is just! *chef's kiss*

Green and white for the Survey Corps colors, and gold keys for...well, you know ;D

This fic was so much fun to bind for so many reasons! Lots of firsts: first time splitting a single fic into two volumes (390k words will do that to ya!), first time doing a full-cloth case, first time hand-sewing headbands, first time I get to use my new imprint logo! I'm super pleased with the results.

Thank you so much for letting me bind your work, Wilde! I adore this fic and am soso happy to finally have it on my shelf <3

Spitfire by @mayakern

What do you do when you're a dragon and the prince you're in love with is getting married? Fuck his wife.

titles/chapter headings: Cinzel Decorative headers/page numbers: Organik body text: Cardo

What can I say about Spitfire? It’s truly an amazing piece of work that is a brilliant high fantasy, queer af and completely engrossing. It gave me everything I ever wanted out of a novel; plot, genderfluid characters, PINING like you wouldn’t believe, great sex scenes, DRAGONS, and just. Women. What more do you need out of a fantasy book?

The design on the covers and the spines are heat transfer foil, the bookcloth is duo, there is variegated thread that I used to sew the signatures together, 3 colour endbands and handmade marbled papers. Spitfire deserves nothing less.

If you’d like to read it, the first 30% is available on AO3, and you can purchase it on Amazon. Go get it!!

I can’t wait to see what happens in Firebrand ✨

Books!!!! I am all out of time order lately, haha. One of these, the one with white-and-gold endpapers, was mostly done before when l posted about After The Storm, but my cricut software had been giving me trouble. Well, I sorted that out, and also sorted out copies for the other coauthors as well!! I've been adjacent to these creators for... wow, many years at this point, and it's so rewarding to be able to put hard copies of their work into their hands :D

[Image ID: A half bound copy of Leave the Children Behind by montparnasse. The book is bound in dark blue bookcloth and paper patterned with silver birch trees drawn in a watercolour style, the background a lighter navy colour scattered with small bronze stars.

The second photo shows the silver endpapers, and the third and fourth photos particular details of the book: the first page, which is headed by a vintage sketch of phases of the moon and a drop cap in the shape of a crescent moon, and a close up of one of the scene breaks further on in the book, which is divided up a tiny first quarter moon. End ID.]

Sometimes projects don’t work out the way you want them to! And that’s fine, totally okay. I didn’t shed a tear when the first set of endpapers ripped in the middle of gluing, but it was a close run thing. No title page photo for that reason cause gluing it twice made the page all wrinkly, god bless.

This fic has been living on my computer as a pdf for many years now, so despite some setbacks with the casing, I’m glad to be able to hold it in my hands. It’s a very beautiful story - I always think of r/s in terms of silver and blue and wanted that to carry over into the typesetting with all the stars and moons. The moon dividers actually go through two whole cycles over the course of the story, changing incrementally with every scene break, which is probably my favourite thing about this round of typesetting.

265 pages and typeset in Traditional Arabic

both fanfiction and podcasts give me a lot of feelings about the potential ephemerality of online media. obviously, no one plans for these things to vanish, but they do, and that lack of permanence gives me feelings. anyway, the silt verses was my first candidate for binding podcast transcripts, because even when you don’t have the audio, the prose is just fantastic.

i half-chose the cover paper because i wanted to nod to the birdwatcher’s book that carpenter disguises her copy as, and half because it’s just really nice paper and feels appropriate even though i’m pretty sure those are seaside birds

formatted in two columns and smaller font both as a space-saving measure (this came out to about 300 pages) and to evoke a biblical style.

(my ideal vision for a bookbound silt verses was: softcover in faux-leather with gilded text, transcripts printed on thin bible paper, and a dustcover designed to look like a birdwatcher’s book, with a publishing emblem inspired by the waxen scrivener. but there are many aspects of that i have neither the skills nor resources for, and i’m very happy with how this turned out!)

Holy shiiiiiiiiiiiii-!!!!!

I FINALLY finished a project I started last year (and put off for a long time because of a move, new job, and was hesitant about making the hard cover). I had so much fun typesetting and designing this one! I love how the title page specifically turned out!! Definitely one of my favorites I've done so far. And I love that I got both Eye and the Web in the design of the hard cover/end pages, with the Web hidden within.

The fic is The Unknown Watcher by arthureameslove. The fanart on the frontispiece is by @art_of_cammie on Instagram!