This is my first year participating in the Renegade Bindery's Binderary event. The first of my completed projects for the month was Heartbreak Ridge, a M*A*S*H fic by @the-wandering-whumper
I knew I wanted to do the bloody handprint cover for this one and was very pleased with how it turned out.
This was my second attempt at a quarto size, and, despite an argument with the margins, it worked out great, perfect size for this 26k word fic.
A year and a half ago, I made a post about @renegadepublishing launching their code of conduct. I’m pleased to report the community has been thriving, and is abuzz with even more growth!
Over the past year and a half:
The Discord size has doubled.
The membership has skyrocketed to nearly 200 members.
Our events have also doubled in participation!
We’ve started four brand new events!
We’ve launched 12 satellite servers with 414 members!
All this, and yet, there’s more to come! I’m pleased to announce yet another massive undertaking has finally come to fruition…
THE RENEGADE BOOKBINDING GUILD WEBSITE!
Renegade has grown so much and still remains such an incredible, vibrant community, and this step forward will only enable us to do so much more. There is still more work to be done, but it’s absolutely amazing how far we’ve come. I can’t wait to keep building this community with all the wonderful people in it! 🎉
We’re currently kicking off Binderary 2024 with a bang, with 34 workshops planned for the month of February, all completely free and community-run!
If you’re waiting for a sign, this is it! Come join us, and start your fanbinding journey!*
One of my favourite sights in my parents' town is this old-timey bookbinder that uses the same techniques they would have hundreds of years ago, and next door to it the protein powder shop Insane Asylum
My grandparents are moving from their home of 36 years into a retirement community, and that means my grandpa is parting out his woodshop. Most everything is staying in the family. I loaded up the stuff I was keeping--a router, a jigsaw, some other odds and ends--and was digging through his wood scrap bin for a couple pieces to make into a little book press for my middle-school aged cousin, who expressed some interest in learning bookbinding.
I found a couple pieces, both the same size and with holes drilled in matching spots on both ends, and a couple bolts nearby. Precisely what I needed, already made! I asked my grandpa if I could have them, and what they'd been used for originally.
Turns out he used them as a book press. He repaired hymnals for his church, and had assembled exactly what I would have made as a little book press.
Two last books before the end of the year! Author copies for the glorious, ridiculous, and immensely fun How To Fall In Love With A Catfish: A Guide By Wei Wuxian (Disaster Rat) by @bitterbeetle and Yuisaki, wherein Wei Wuxian makes a new friend on Tinder who claims he's Lan Wangji (sus). This was the first MDZS fic I read once I had a faint clue who at least Wei Wuxian was, and I was so happy to make these for the author (and for a friend!).
Much as I love WWX/LWJ, they do NOT have great matching colors so it makes it difficult to incorporate into a single good-looking color scheme. But! With two author copies to make, I didn't have to choose!
It was really fun making complementary books. I forgot to get shots of the endbands but they were also gold and silver, respectively.
The typeset was incredibly fun to work with. There are a ton of Tinder chats, which I incorporated into the title page.
There are also some other phone chats (modeled off of Samsung texts), Twitter, and Google search results, to add to my social media coding repetoire.
Huge thanks to the authors for writing such a hilarious fic and being part of my introduction to MDZS fics! <3
I made another book! This time I tried my hand at binding a copy of @marvinhere‘s tumblr folktales typeset. Endpapers were chosen because they kinda looked like that “do you love the color of the sky” post, and then I tipped them in upside down 🤦♀️ oh well, it’s not super noticeable
some of y’all with printed copies of fanfiction are going to die someday and your books will end up at the secondhand book shop and someone is just going to innocently pick up blorbo/shitto enemies to lovers and when i think of it this way let’s keep printing fanfiction
A lot of marginalized history is lost when people die and folks going through the estate in a hurry, with no idea what they’re looking at, pitch it all in the “Donate” box – or the garbage. This last especially happens when it’s LGBT+.
Fanbinders and folks who received copies: it’s something to think about! Do your part to preserve fandom history.
* Put your books in your will.
* Choose a fannish next of kin. (You can formally designate a fannish next of kin on AO3 for your account there.)
* Put copies of your wishes for the books *between* the books on the shelf.
Speaking as a fandom historian who’s finding it stupidly difficult to collect older zines in SETS so I can document the conversations had in the letters to the editor:
PLEASE DO THIS!!!
Heaven forbid any of you should pass on at an untimely age, but I can’t tell you what a blessing I’d consider it to receive someone’s hand-bound fanfiction as a museum exhibit with a little letter in the front explaining why they picked that story to bind and how they did it. THAT’S HISTORY. THAT’S MAKING HISTORY. That letter would be called “provenance” and it explains where the item came from and how it came to be, and may provide things like a date or place of origin. I’m literally reading a novel-length fanfiction right now in a fandom I have zero interest in because it’s from 1978, I found the author–still alive–online, and I want to talk to her about her fanfiction before it’s too late. You can have that conversation now. Even if you’re like “I’m 17, who cares about my Dream SMP fanfiction?” I assure you, years from now, having a bound copy of your Dream SMP fanfiction will be something to write academic papers about. On the levels of transformative work (since Dream is, himself, making a transformative work of Minecraft), on the fact that this was a digital fandom from which a tangible work was created, on the fact that you took the time to learn amateur bookbinding to make it happen, all of that will be as historically valuable 30 years from now as teenage diaries from the moon landing are today. All of it! Anything you write in there? Thoughts on what you read, on the bookbinding process, on where you found the story? That shit is so valuable it makes gold look cheap.
If you’re in an all-digital fandom, the fact that you have this item tangibly makes you a keeper of record. In other words: if the entire internet went down forever tomorrow, we would still have proof the property existed and some evidence of how people interacted with it, thanks to you. I can’t overstate how important that is, but I can give you an example: do you know we don’t actually know what all the items were in a traditional Victorian condiment set? Today we’ve got salt, pepper, ketchup, sugar, and occasionally mustard, but we have no idea what all of those items were 130 years ago. Nobody ever fucking wrote it down. It was just assumed that you knew what went into A Proper Table Service, and as times and tastes changed, whoops, there goes that knowledge. Are you bookbinding the next Shakespeare? Probably not, but let’s get real, back in 1598 even Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, he was just some guy who wrote pretty good plays–but today we consider his work a wealth of cultural knowledge.
So yes! Keep this stuff! Write down the provenance! Consider also looking into generalized historians like me (there aren’t many of us out there, but the number is growing as academia realizes how much transformative fandom really has its own culture and history), and looking into specific places you want your fannish works to go. There are academic libraries out there absolutely overflowing with Kirk/Spock zines they can’t interpret (because they have nobody on staff who studies fandom history), don’t know what to do with, and now have to consider throwing away because what the hell do they want with a copy of Spockanalia? (ME. SEND IT TO ME.) BUT, there are also academics who’d love to get their hands on this stuff, if only people knew they existed. Do a little research, make fandom historians happy, and rest easy knowing your work will be treated with care and dignity when you’re gone.
Let's post another lovely fic I had the honor of binding for its author!
Angel with a Shotgun
By sillu | @silluuuu
This is a modern AU Soul Eater fic where Maka puts an ad on Craigslist to get a fake boyfriend and I'm sure you know where this is going...
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
I had so much fun incorporating all the phone and tech elements into the story.
As you might expect Craigslist played a central role so I made the cover page look like the CL main search page for the city the story the story is located in with the author's name appearing where the CL name typically would be. The scene break icon is modeled after the CL peace sign. I also used this for the image on the front of the cover and the light purple/white cloth for the cover is Duo cloth which I also chose to try to recall the soft purple of the semi transparent CL name in the ad.
I researched and worked to recreate what a mobile Craigslist ad looks like to put it in the body of the typeset and I am really happy with the way it turned out! Many little boxes all needing to work together.
I used an iPhone message creator to create all the text messages. (My favorite bit of that was leaving just a smidge of the last text above the ones that were currently showing to help make it feel like looking at a phone)
Except for the text from Blake right when Soul looks at the ad. I wanted to show it was intruding on him still looking at the ad so I hand modeled that one to look like a pop up notification appearing over the ad.
The Instagram post! Had to make an icon for the bar that was posting as well as design the post as well. I tried using a fake Instagram post maker but it wasn't working well so I just built that one in the typeset as well.
Chapter and book titles are Trader Joes inspired as there is a scene there that get called back to later one. There is a brief use of the iphone notes app so had to create that as well.
The end pages are some I marbled back in April at the Renegade Retreat as well as some shiny purple added to the inside so the painty fingerprints on the backs of the marbled don't show through.
Back cover image is a wing in monochrome and represents a tattoo in the story.
This rebind is a Christmas present to my friend @/ouabh_updates (Instagram). She got OUABH and TBNOA as a rebind for her birthday too and when I saw her shelf I joked that now I have to make a blue book to fit in with the rest :^)
It was really hard to not post any WIPs in my stories lmfao.
About the rebind:
✦ blue duo bookcloth
✦ vinyl frog gold foil htv
✦ dust jacket art illustrated by me
✦ decided to post the sketches for the dust jacket nd cover too - I think it's always cool to see how the draft looks like vs the final result
the hardest part of this bind was not to post anything on my insta stories 😂
This is the second Hua Cheng sketchbook. Notable changes: the braided bookmark is made from ribbon this time, and I liked it a lot better. Much easier to work with.
The vinyl lettering I chose a more messy handwriting font, for Hua Cheng's canonically bad handwriting.
The other materials are the same, except I went back to the heat n bond method for the bookcloth.
Specifically, I made 2 different errors that I covered up with vinyl. One was a small cut where the bookcloth wraps around the book, usually a nightmare. But vinyl adheres completely and fixed the structural issue a tiny 1 cm cut can cause.
The second was a smear of the distress mica I used for the silver spray, and an extra butterfly covered that with no issue.
Happily The Serpent and the Seagull by @ineffably-good as megzseattle made it to her. It is an absolutely wonderful series, Frederick is utterly hilarious and the ineffable idiots are in prime form. This marks my 100th book bound and I was so delighted to send it to ineffably-good. Inside title art by @goodomensficrecommendations
Aug 2023, bookbinding of The Silent Isle Imbowers by Tharkuun.
I’m sooo so so pleased to finally share this! I have been actively working on this for many months and waited until Tharkuun received her copy before posting so the final result would be a surprise.
-----------About this bookbinding under the cut
This binding has been one of the more elaborate pieces I have attempted so far. This has been my first binding where I (1) made three copies of a piece at once, (2) used a modified a historical illustration, (3) collaborated directly with another artist on the decorative elements, (4) finished matching art for the cover and title page, and (5) layered paint and heat-transfer vinyl for the covers. These are also (6) the first non-tiny books I have made with this style of hinge and cover attachment.
Pretty much immediately after I first read this story I felt I had to make myself a copy of this. I had a strong mental image of a vintage-looking cover for a fairy tale, with a deceptively simple design of flowers on the cover, probably with fancy metallic accents, the kind of thing you’d find in an interesting used bookstore with no summary, no text on the back, no dust jacket, just the flowers and maybe a title. I’m going to make a separate post about making this cover design a reality because oh man has it been a journey lol! I designed and drew the digital art for the cover (digital because of the cut and application method), as well as the corresponding title page illustration (pencil and dip pen, scanned, title added digitally).
When I asked Tharkuun about it she was excited to suggest I get in touch with quillingwords, who generously agreed to collaborate with me! Among her talents quilling writes calligraphy, and hand wrote both the book title and chapter headers for me to incorporate into my plans. Check OUT those chapter headers! So fancy! A font could never!! Quilling has also been very encouraging and let me yell about this project in dms for months so the final result could be a surprise for Tharkuun. Thank u so much quillingwords, your calligraphy adds invaluable amounts of swag to this project.
I was going to do some kinda neat font for the chapter headers, but quilling’s work is too cool for that and I decided to use a modified piece of a historical illustration instead. The illustration also happens to be cool as heck: I was browsing the Artstor database (an academic quality resource available for free via Jstor, my beloved) and found E. N. Neureuther's 1836 gorgeous etching for etching of the fairy tale Briar Rose, an illustration made for a printing of a Brothers Grimm recorded German fairy tale with Sleeping Beauty elements. Much to my delight this illustration not only matches the general look I wanted but is actually relevant to the story, itself a Sleeping Beauty spinoff.
Slightly less stylistically consistent are the endpapers, which are prints of two different paintings by Arnold Böcklin: Isle of the Dead (1883) in the front and Isle of Life (1888). The first painting had occurred to me as an excellent visual to go with the story, and Tharkuun and I discussed this and agreed that pairing it with the related later, more optimistic piece was too thematically appropriate to resist.
I had fun and learned a lot making these books and I am very pleased with the result!!
Materials: Archival bookboard, cardstock, cotton cheesecloth mull, archival PVA glue, linen thread coated in beeswax, paper cord, red cotton embroidery floss. Blue cotton backed with archival paper, acrylic paint, machine cut black and gold heat-transfer vinyl. Laser printed text and illustrations. Metallic scrapbooking paper.
This was one of the very first fics I started typesetting! I started it last summer, when I first got into ficbinding, as it's one of my all-time favorite Stetopher fics and I knew I would want a copy on my shelf. The typeset itself went through MANY different iterations, as I kept revisiting it as I learned more over the last year. It's also one of the only fics that I didn't struggle with design decisions on at all, and it came together exactly as I was envisioning.
Fic: Firebreak by Whreflections (cc: @whreflections)
Words: 24,451
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
titsay
