I know myself well enough to know I would not be very good at fanbiding and that would mainly frustrate me, so while I love fan binding and admire those who do it, I've never dabbled.
I have never regretted that decision more than I did waking up from the dream I recently had, where I excitedly bought a rare copy of the novel that Goncharov (1973) was based on, opened it up, and found that it was a hollowed out "book safe" for keeping valuables in.
@copperbadge were you looking for the Goncharov novel ?
I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.
(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)
It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰
Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:
Just kidding.
It holds only the air of regret and disappointment.
A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.
thank you! rebound might've been the wrong word to use, i found a copy of #15 in pretty terrible condition so it was mainly regluing pages, stripping (what remained of) the cover & reinforcing it again etc. very thankful animorphs uses perfect binding, good for beginners 🙏🙏
It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
The next morning came. And a few more people signed up. I tentatively suggested that if anyone wanted to include a card or note and maybe some stickers for her wife and their kiddo L, it would be welcome. And people started asking me questions. Like, what fic does she like best? Where should we start? Can we make a care package? What does her wife need?
Knowing the people in the server, and their general kindness and enthusiasm, I should not have been surprised, I really shouldn't. It just hits differently when you're the one who's the recipient, you know? "I don't know why you're surprised," said another friend. "You asked us to help and we're helping!" And it wasn't an official guild project, just an incredible act of community and compassion. And immense enthusiasm and zero restraint.
I started asking some surreptitious questions of Zulu and Bell. I'd asked Zulu a few weeks before about granting blanket permission for anyone to bind her fic, and for the typesets to be shared. I casually said, "Sooo I mentioned this to the fanbinding group. If someone does want to send you something, can I share your address? And can I suggest they send cards/stickers to L?" (Yes, and yes.)
We started a separate thread in the Discord server to keep up with the planning. Some collaborations started to come up. I'll typeset from South Africa or southeast Asia or from next door in the next US state, you print and bind, we'll collect some of the American books for a mass mailing to Canada. I don't have time to bind, but I can contribute to shipping costs. I don't know that fandom, but I can take your typeset, and make a copy. I love that fandom but don't have time and materials, but I'll typeset if you bind. At this point, there were more than thirty people involved. New-old fandoms were discovered. Techniques and experiments grew.
I told Bell a little bit. She knew there were books coming. I didn't let her know the full scope, but I figured she could use something good to look forward to. Zulu said one of her goals was to finish all her WIPs before she died. (That hurt my heart. She almost made it! But even at the end, she got distracted by a new fic idea...)
The behind the scenes binding continued. There was negotiating over obscure fandoms, and exclamations over fic for niche favourites. A need for a great deal of baseball theming because Zulu wrote a LOT of ALOTO fic in the last few years. There were anthologies and pamphlets, and tiny books, and large chonks, and an entire collection of every drabble Zulu ever wrote in House fandom.
There was a 100-word hockey RPF drabble bound in a one-page folio with metallic foil details. There was a whole-fandom slipcased pamphlet set of her handful of Friday Night Lights fic. There were Buffy and X-Files fic unearthed from deep in her backlist. There were several bonkers-ambitious binds of her SMAUs, social media AUs of tweets and screenshots that had me throw up my hands and exclaim "how am I supposed to typeset this?"
There were obscure Canadian fandoms encased in the fanciest of marbled paper pamphlets, and a House fic about stolen lunches bound in a brown paper bag. A flower-titled ALOTO fic with a cover patterned like a seed packet. A Yuletide obscure movie fic in silk moire. Firefly fic with a marbled paper inset, and a Stargate Atlantis fic with a vellum dustcover. A crackfic five things fic with a metallic paper DVD on the cover as a Chinese stab binding, from a fandom that needed MOAR LENS FLARE. ("I am sure you know this, Luna," said the binder working on it, "but Zulu is really fucking funny." Yes, yes she absolutely was.)
I can't name every single book because there were more than FORTY of them, but I love every one of them and the care that went into them.
I told you Renegade goes hard.
We drove to nearby city to see Zulu and Bell in August, 2024. They'd just changed up her pain medication and she was having a good day. We had a good visit. I put the pamphlet fic in her hands myself. They'd told her in June that she should expect about a year at most. It would only be three months. That was the last time I saw her in person.
We moved up the projected mailing date from mid-October to mid-September.
We knew, over the September long weekend, when the group chat went quiet, that it wasn't a good sign. I'd kept up a steady stream of pet pictures and other small bits of news. As the summer ended, we had fewer responses from her, and were more likely to just get an emoji back. Morning glory flowers only bloom for a day, and they were blooming outside my back door. I started sending a picture of that morning's flowers to the group chat each day. (And cat pictures. Of course.) I don't know if anyone but me really cared about the morning glories, but it felt like something tangible to hold onto.
The first few envelopes and boxes started to arrive. There were cards and stickers and handknit slippers, and a science facts zine just for L. I told Bell, tell Zulu we love her. And that I'm not sorry I unleashed 30+ fanbinders on her AO3 account.
Bell: (lists off the books that had arrived.)
Me: Oh, so the group shipment from California isn't there yet. Plus at least three other packages I know about.
Bell: Holy shites
Several lovely people found my name in the acknowledgements of more than one fic, and sent me copies, too. (Twenty years in fandom together…) I cried.
We knew things weren't good when Bell emailed to set up a time for a video chat. A few days after the September long weekend, we talked to them face to face, to get the news that they were moving Zulu into hospice care the next day. It would be the last time we'd hear her voice. We knew it was coming, it just all went so much more quickly than expected. She died less than three weeks later.
(But take a look at the dates on the last fic on her AO3 account. In such typical fandom fashion, she was updating her last fic from her hospice bed. A direct quote from Zulu: "The most important thing once I'm there, of course, will be to sort out the wifi situation.")
So, timelines got bumped up by another week. There was a rush for mailing. One international package from Europe got returned to sender without leaving the country due to post office shenanigans, and had to make a return trip, too late for Zulu. The package from Japan made it. The big group shipment box was sent via overnight delivery. It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It showed up on Friday, the day that she died, after she was gone. But by that last week, I'm not sure how much Zulu would have taken in about it, honestly. Bell took it with her to supper that night with friends and family to open as a special treat.
There were more than forty books of all sizes all told, from more than thirty people, and I still have about four more in progress myself right now, though I'll never get to put them in Zulu's hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS…"
But we flooded her with books of her own fic. We deluged her family with her words and love.
The books were on display at her memorial service, along with the quilt that her ALOTO friends had made for her. Also, the jersey she got printed based on her own fic (such a dork, I say with the world's most affection.) The books were all over the front of the room, and it wasn't even all of them. Zulu's mom sent a heartfelt thank you card to be shared with the whole group. The memorial also included earl grey tea and shrimp (two of Zulu's favourites) and a video message recorded to her from one of the actors from A League of Their Own (which I am sure confused many people, but we knew what was up!)
The second group shipment arrived with me several months later, and at least one more book came to me in person at the Renegade retreat, and Bell has them all in a bookcase together. I still have a few more to finish right now.
And, Renegade being Renegade, a couple of people have eyed Zulu's AO3 account and said, "Well, we didn't manage to bind ALL her 350 fic… so far…" And I laughed until I cried, and I am still hugging you all right now Renegade, SO HARD. And you've left a legacy, and you've made a difference. There are no thank you's that are enough. The love is stored in the fanbinds.
I've asked anyone who wants to share what they made to tag it #fanbindsforzulu. If you want to see some amazing things, check out the tag. And if you want to read her fic, and if you want to bind it, she would have loved that, and I would love to see it, too. And tell your friends you love them.
Bookbinding: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in Braille.
So if any of you remember me having a breakdown about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner a few months ago...I've finally finished it!
The write-up for this is long so I'm putting it below the cut.
I. THE BRAILLING
I manually transcribed the entire poem using PerkyDuck.
"Isn't there a free program that will do that automatically?" you may ask. Yes. There is. It's called BrailleBlaster, and you just paste in your text and it transcribes it for you. It even automates the page numbers. Delightful! However. When embossing via BrailleBlaster, you cannot set the left margin to 6", which is what I needed to do to be able to fold it like a booklet.* I even called their customer support, had a hell of a time explaining what I was after, and their final conclusion was that wasn't possible but they were entertained that I was trying to do it in the first place. (I also tried importing BrailleBlaster files into PerkyDuck. No go.)
*The pages are not double sided: I have a $100 embosser, and the kinds that do double sided run more like $5,000. I think I could have done it manually if I'd fiddled with the offset but frankly life's too short.)
So! Manual transcription it was. It's kind of soothing.
I was using Grade 2 Braille, which contracts a lot of common words or letter combinations. (e.g. "because" two letters: "be"+"c", and "mariner" is four letters: "m"+"ar"+"in"+"er".) I would love to tell you that I'm a prodigy who casually memorized all the contractions and shortforms, but what I actually did was turn my reference text into a cheatsheet:
The part where I had to proofread it was less soothing, and felt more like I was learning to read again by sounding out words. I think I ended up going over it two or three times, and I'm sure I missed some things, but such is life.
II. THE PRINTING
For reasons that will be obvious if you think about it for a moment, braille paper is dot matrix. So to print each seven-sheet signature, I'd print 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and then I'd flip it over, reload it, and print 14,13,12,11,10,9,8. Since the first page is the title page, the braille page numbers and what the computer thought the page numbers were were one off, and I ended up making a chart with both computer and braille page numbers so I wouldn't lose track.
There was also a subplot where it kept cutting off at 15 lines; eventually me and a friend figured out that there was a light sensor on the embosser that would detect when there were no more pages, and it would cut it off there so it wouldn't break itself by dry firing. Great system, when you consider it's made for people who can't just glance over to see how much paper is left. Terrible system for what I was trying to do. I ended up taping a tiny piece of paper over the sensor, and then it worked fine.
III. THE BINDING
I did my first (well, second, but first that I had and could photograph) braille binding a couple years back, and did a Coptic binding. The problem with that, as you can imagine, is that with nothing to brace the spine, and with all that space between the pages, it tends to twist. So I wanted to try it using @queercore-curriculum's embroidered spine method.
Unfortunately I did not remotely comprehend the embroidered spine method. Fortunately dj, who still does not have a tumblr, did (and also helped with the spine design, and ended up sewing a decent number of the signatures herself when I got insanely frustrated): between that and @gempothospress figuring out how to make the blackwork work properly line up on the backside, it was very much a group effort.
Because of the spacing of the signatures, there were some big gaps:
What I should have done was glue down some decorative paper on the back of the spine before punching the holes, but since I didn't do that, I micro-spatulated some strips of paper in between there. (I went with one with a fun texture.)
The endpapers are also textured; I'd originally planned to use them for Moby Dick, and a few years ago I sewed an entire text block of Moby Dick that I ended up not using, so I cut them off and repurposed them.
The cover art is HTV. The albatross came through perfectly. The boat has been haunting me all afternoon. I'm gonna call the fact that it looks pretty beat up ~thematic~ and leave it at that.
IV. THE CONCLUSION
It's a 4,000 word poem, which using this frankly insane method, came out to a 3" tall 6x9" book.h ere's a reason Braille books are 11x11.5" spiral-bound double-sided affairs. I knew going in that this would be silly, and the result is in fact silly, but also, I think it's neat, and that's what's important here.
More details of my binding of Rats in the Walls. The fish leather was rather rough looking but the dying and coated the surface so I could easily polish it a bit with an agate burnisher, smoothen the surface while enhancing the scale pattern on it. I also had a lot of fun with the typeset.
im finally reading The King In Yellow and im pleased to report it is as good as everyone who has read it since 1895 said it was. something ive always pondered about zine culture is why we (collectively referring to "independent creators", ie the people who sell self published stuff at conventions etc) aren't making our own editions of out of copyright stuff like this with our own layouts, typesetting and illustrations. or just producing straight reprints with theold typesetting and illustrations. i would love to have editions of old stories interpreted by modern artists like this. it happens with lovecraft all the time but ive personally never run into any other authors being given the same treatment and i think it would be cool. ive always intended to do it with Lord Dunsany specifically. short stories are a great medium for it too because you could do one story per zine instead of tackling an entire book at once, and then compile them into a collected edition later
every time i get a harebrained idea like "what if i made my own printing plates and made a zine edition of the Repairer of Reputations" and start looking into costs i find out laser engraving machines cost like $70 now. it's cheaper to just buy printers and shit now than it is to hire someone to print you a book, but DIY shit is considered some sort of dark magic by almost everyone under the age of 40 and im not sure how to square these two facts in my observations. it has never been easier to just buy sophisticated production machines and use them at home
Three green books I found at work. Many years ago we apparently paid extra for the library bindery to use the fancy patterned buckram instead of the boring solid color stuff. I love finding these in the stacks, and so far I’ve never found two of the same pattern and color!
So far I've only bound fanfiction, but I actually have so many podcasts that are on my list as well! Starting off here with the first season of @vestaclinicpod, which you should all listen to if you like cosy audio dramas in space. They're currently airing their second season!
Chisel trimming went a lot smoother on this one than on the last book, and while the sawtooth edge has never really bothered me before the smooth edge is SO satisfying. I'm not entirely happy with the foiling on the title page (how is fine print actually easier to do with the foil quill than thick letters 😩) but overall I really love the result.
Some more pictures of the typeset below! SEC got his own font cause he's a special boy ✨
Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)
Process under the cut.
Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)
I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.
After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)
Then, leather:
As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.
I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)
The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)
The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.
It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.
I’m reblogging again because I did it myself and added pictures for those who have trouble learning from the video.
First take a standard rectangular piece of paper (I used one from a small notebook which I ripped out then cut the holes off)
Then fold in half touching the shorter side to the opposite shorter side.
Fold again making the new shorter side touch the other new shorter side
I did this one more time, but this time I unfolded it right after to get back to where it was only folded twice. It should have left a crease in the paper.
Using this crease, fold the corners up alongside it to look like this
This are also going to be unfolded, but this time you’re going to push in alongside the triangular folds you just made and undid.
Doing this once will result in this
Hold tight because tumblr won’t let me add more pictures. I’ll reblog will the rest of the instructions
Thanatos knows that I hecking love cute origami, and moths, so really, what was I supposed to do, scroll past and not take the opportunity to make butterfly and moth page markers???
