Bleating Book Bindery

If you are an author whose fic I've bound I can make you a copy as well (and/or send you the typeset). This offer does not expire :) If you messaged me on tumblr and didn't get a reply you can try my e-mail: [email protected]

[chubsonthemoon]

hiiiiii! zay has his copy now so I can post pics!! :D

I don't normally bind my own work, but after zay did an incredible podfic of one of my jayvik fics, I decided to give a go! (and so I could make him a copy too hehe). this is a bind of the podfic of my little seaside post-canon, when it comes my turn to lose you. gorgeous artwork on the CDs is by @moonartjb and @wr0wn. (full pieces, which have and deserve their own posts, are here and here!)

as always, more crafty chatter under the cut! <3

This was such a fun challenge! I knew going in that I wanted a format that would showcase the podfic in a physical way, but I went back and forth on how best to do that. While I was puzzling out possible dimensions, I came across the digibook and went !!!:

From there, it was just a matter of sizing the textblock and case around the CDs, then making paper pockets for each board to house them. For the textblock, I measured the dimensions of a CD and a standard jewel case as a starting point, then found a size I thought would work best. I printed on my usual short-grain letter paper and trimmed twice--once after sewing the signatures, then again after gluing the spine. The finished size of the book is the same height as a jewel case, and a little shorter length-wise:

(comparison photo with another bound podfic by zay hehe)

For the CD pockets, I used cream printer paper and folded them using this tutorial (...don't ask me how many times I had to refold them to get the dimensions exactly right ajsdlfkjs).

All in all, I'm quite happy with this size! I think it strikes a nice balance between book and CD case, and it feels nice and sturdy in the hand, especially with both CDs in there (Disc 1 is chapters 1-4, and Disc 2 is chapters 5-7!)

Another one of my favorite bits of this bind is the window inset! Original photo is by Daniel Gorostieta, which I edited in Affinity Publisher and printed on Epson photo paper. I then layered a sheet of acetate between the boards to give it that reflective window quality, and also to protect the photo paper, which can be vulnerable to scratching and fading if left exposed.

But by far the COOLEST part of this bind was getting to hand it to zay in person!! I've only ever mailed author copies before, so it was amazing getting to meet up and hand him something we'd both worked on together 🥹

And finally, one last credit--the beautiful metal spiral bookmark (which I just had to include in the pics) was a gift to me, literally forged by dear @zillac. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever received, and I can't believe it's mine!! I will treasure it forever <3

Between the artwork, the podfic, meeting zay, and zil's gift (which arrived around the time I was finishing this bind)--gosh! All my books are a mosaic of people and stories I care about, but this one felt extra special 💌

And that's all for today! Once more for the road: you can listen to zay's podfic on ao3, here <3

[teleportbooks]

Bookbinding: How Dare You!? / Cheng He Ti Tong by Qi Ying Jun

I also made this for @spockandawe for an exchange! But I wanted to bind it myself, too. Would you believe I made it halfway through this novel before realizing it was by the same author as Are You OK? (the author's name is different on different platforms I guess?) I was like "this author's doing some very neat stuff with transmigration ... hey, wait a sec!"

Since the concept of this novel is transmigrating into a transmigration novel, I made a triple-layer cutout cover. The outermost cover is the "original" novel, followed by the in-universe transmigration novel, and finally the actual novel, where instead of a proper cover design it gets a hastily-written* sharpie title on note paper.

I was going to put more colors in the endbands and fewer in the splatter-painted edges, but it turns out if you only use brown paint for splattered edges ... even if it is a very nice brown in other contexts ... it looks like the book is moldy. So I added some blue too and at that point I thought a multicolored endband would be too much.

My laser printer can't print to the edges of the pages, so for the floral background, I printed just the border on my inkjet printer, and then printed the text of those specific pages afterwards.

There is a typographical easter egg! If you've read the novel, you can see if you can figure it out (it's present on one of the pages pictured here).

*actually I wrote it it about ten times before getting a version I liked enough to use

[teleportbooks]

I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!

(which you can listen to here on archive.org)

This is my first time doing a buttonhole stitch binding. Most examples I saw were blank notebooks, and had decorative sheets wrapped fully around the outside of each section of paper, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the text, so I just pasted a thin strip of the marbled paper down to the outer fold edge of each section.

[shalottpress]

The Starless Road by orphan_account

The Starless Road is a beautiful Silmarillion fanfic that tells the tale of Fingon's quest into the Void to find Maedhros. If anyone hasn't read it it is sublime and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When I saw @missmists's stunning typeset for the story in the Renegade 2025 Typeset exchange slideshow, I literally gasped out loud and I knew it was one I wanted to bind for my own collection. They did such a wonderful job and it is so beautiful! They also very kindly resized the typesetting to fit A4 when I was going to struggle to get this printed with the original settings. Huge kudos, I really really appreciated it.

I managed to get the text block printed and sewn a while ago but the cover design fought me every step of the way.

I tried a bunch of different designs, but the interaction with the spider queen in the void is my favourite part of the story so I had to make the cover very spider focused! The illustration on the cover was taken from a satirical political bookplate designed by Lorenzo Brunet in the early 1900s. The cover was designed in Canva, printed on matte photo paper, then covered in soft touch laminate before being adhered to the book board.

So thrilled I have this on my shelf now, it’s such a lovely fic.

[runawaymarbles]

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. There'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.

[szynkaaa]

Cataclysmic Architecture - An Anthology of Two Souls Colliding by @saveourskinship

saveourskinship is a trans-ally and does not support and promote the view of J.K. Rowling. Please consider donating to https://smalltranslibrary.org/

About the bind: ✦ This bind is an anthology of various Dramione fics written by saveourskinship. I reached out to them personally for permission and also an anthology title, they gave me several suggestions and I picked this one as I liked it the most ✦ this is also my first fully colored typeset. I made three custom illustrations to separate the stories. ✦ Each story uses a color palette inspired by Wes Anderson movie scenes ✦ I went with a square format for the bind because I really wanted to make the cake box from the movie and retain the square shape of it ✦ all marbled papers (endpaper, box inside lining) were made by @mlcbindings . I had the chance to meet a local binder and we exchanged some materials. When I looked through my stack of papers I knew I had to use those to match the colors of my bind ✦ I decided to go very simple for the front cover, and mimic the font style of Asteroid City.

[szynkaaa]

Ted Chiang's short story collection

A color variant from the set I made last year

Schiggy photobombed the shoot so now he is part of the photos now

[dontcallmebree]

I clawed my way into the light, but the light is just as scary by romcommie, binding by DCB Bindery

Summary: You're lying. You're leaving the important parts out again. You're ignoring what's happening in the house, you're ignoring the red string that's supposed to be leading the way, time-adherent. Of course. That's because all strings can be cut, all strings can wind up dead ends, all things can be taken away, including time. The string's not red because of the poetry of it all, bub. It's red because someone's bled all over it.

Ever since I found the beloved name, exiled, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it or the series it belongs to. Thank you to @bromcommie for letting me bind this incredible work for this year’s Binderary!

Specs: Accordion binding with hardcovers and half A5 sheets as tabs, A6, 31 pages.

On the process: This was one hell of a gauntlet, from typesetting free verse poetry to my first foray into accordion binding. I ended up quite pleased with the typeset, but it was impossible to take proper pictures of all the details, so please forgive my rambling description.

This singular accordion binding contains both parts of the series, which starts at either end of the book. Each side reads like a regular book, with coordinating hard covers, title pages, etc. The two parts are printed on opposite sides of the same sheets. So depending on which cover you read from, you’re getting a different book in the series. A few elements in the title, series, and other supplemental pages are inspired by the use of morse code in the poems.

Mirroring the narrative, all elements in the common denominator of all truth start off in red. The text then gradually turns black as we arrive at the end. This ‘back cover’ is where the beloved name, exiled starts on the other side. Similarly, the gradient is present where all elements start in black and goes to red, mirroring where the narrative starts and ends.

Given the two characters featured in these two parts and their journeys, the significance of these opposite colors representing their endings was so fun for me to execute.

The gradient is also most prominent and easiest to follow along the line on the bottom where the page numbers are, an exciting element to bring to the accordion binding. Except it was impossible to take pictures of the effect because the accordion expands into a very long book. But I promise the line on the bottom goes from red to black and vice versa for each respective work in the series.

The binding itself was really tricky, not least because the paper I used was very thin. Glueing every single page was finicky, tedious, and took a lot of trial and error. I refuse to discuss the skew.

Overall, this was actually a fun challenge to typeset and an interesting new type of binding for me to try. I just wish it wasn’t so hard to take pictures highlighting all the cool details I was excited about executing.

More DCB Bindery Projects

[roseserpentpress]

🧮✨AUTOMATIC BOOK BINDERY STATS CALCULATOR VERSION 2.0 IS OUT! ✨🧮

EMPTY Finished Bindery Book Log_2.0

Did YOU wanna have an easy way to calculate stats about the books you've bound over the years? Well, look no further! Filling out the sheet with your binding details will automatically calculate many stats for you, and this new and expanded edition includes categories such as c-novels and stories split into multiple books!

🧮Some of the stats calculated include 🧮

Total # of books you've bound and per category (fanfiction, c-novels, published literature, original fiction, other) for single story books, anthologies and stories split over multiple books!

Number of unique books total and per each category!

Total # of copies!

Total # of anthologies!

Total # of words bound!

Total # of fanfics bound!

List of and total # of years you've been binding!

List of and total # of fandoms!

List of and total # of different book sizes!

And many more!

New features include some layout changes from the past edition, but if you've used past editions you can pretty much just copy paste into the new layout without issue. The old edition also still exists in the sheet of it would be preferred to be used. As always, if you notice any issues please do let me know or let me know if you have recommendations for other stats not calculated. Also if you do use it and post about your stats, please tag me! I love hearing that it's been used.

[roseserpentpress]

Book two of the Gerard Way's Vampire Detective Agency by jjtaylor (prev book here), The Detective's Secret and the Mystery of the Dancing Flowers! I dropped having a more similar cover for the sequel to the first for an antique cover design (Verzamelde Opstellen, erste bundel, by Lvan Deyssel) that I absolutely fell in love with and fit the sequel quite well (if we wanna split hairs, the Hounds of Baskerville by sherlock in the same first edition collection has a widely different cover). In fact I kinda went bonkers for using oak leaf designs throughout the book in entirety, but what can I say I love a theme. I know the dancing flowers are a viscaria but like... So many good oak leaf designs for the green man out there...

The photos of the book that I could find online only included the front cover, so had to mock up my own spine (it has designs on the spine, you just can't see em) and played around with the design for the back to get them in a way I liked. Spent most of the time while painting the covers binging my way through the white vault, which I do highly recommend btw. All in all very pleased with the result; nothing like such a fun repeating design like this, and I also got to trot out again my newly learned double core endbands, which I did this time with five different colours (we getting fancy!)

The Detectives Secret and the Mystery of the Dancing Flowers by jjtaylor (M, 84k)

Wanted: Replacement Valet for high profile Midnighter household. Must have excellent references, believable reason for leaving former place of employment, all Clan paperwork in order. Experience in filing, housekeeping, carriage driving, men's grooming, bookkeeping, scheduling. Highly desirable skills include: basic gardening, Daylighter legal practices, first-aid, hand-to-hand combat. Please contact Frank Iero for more information.

[sits-bound]

photos by @phoenixortheflame!

The dragon is a pearlescent, gleaming white. Its hundreds of scales are catching the light from the nearby fires, reflecting the orange light back as shards of rainbows. It has an iridescent ruff, like a translucent collar, just under its head, circling its neck. (from Draconem dormientem nunquam excitat)

Bound: Dragon!Draco by @toomuchplor

I found myself going to the city where plor lives, and of course I had to bring a bind as a little gift. And it seems like if I'm going to bind something of plor's, it's going to be a series of fics instead of just one. (Prev)

And look, how could I resist Dragon!Draco? It practically designs itself! (Well, trust me, it doesn't, actually.) Dragons, dragons, everywhere!

This was my first backed book, because now I have the tools necessary to make one. I think it came out okay, but I'm sure they'll get better with practice.

I foiled all of the title headers, much like I did for Steinway!Verse, so I'm nothing if not predictable when it comes to my plor binds.

The endpapers came from Paper Source, and the cover material is Skivertex Sanigal in ivory (it's paper that looks like leather.) I used an iridescent HTV for the cover decoration, which went onto the Skivertex beautifully (unlike the bookcloth I was originally going to use, but threw away in a fit of rage.)

I think my favorite fic of the series is Tempest in a Teacup so I really wanted to have an illustration of a tiny dragon in a mug, but I cannot draw! So I am going to be making a podfic for @mihorina in exchange for a drawing. Isn't it so cute?!?

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

All Things Old Are New Again by The Feels Whale

This is one of the fic that I typeset in 2023(!) and bound in 2024(!) and has unfairly been lingering in my draft posts since last summer. Life has been happening! More eventfully than I would like! (I did manage to finish and post a book for FFWAD at least. And took part in the Tiny Book Bang.) But I need to catch up a little bit on sharing some other projects.

This is such a fun MDZS fic by @thefeelswhale. "Full-time necromancer and part-time cam boy, Wei Wuxian, finds himself unexpectedly homeless. An enthusiastic patron comes to his rescue. Conversely: Immortal Cultivator Lan Wangji has been waiting a long time for his deceased husband to be reincarnated again. In retrospect, he should have anticipated that this is how it would go."

You can see my full rec and some more details of the interior shots in the typeset post.

The cover is patterned lokta mulberry fibre paper, and the title is a pasted-on label. If I'd been planning ahead, I might have gotten fancier and done an inset in the bookboard to put the label in, but I did not. Maybe next time I do something similar! I wanted a way for the title to stand out against the geometric pattern though, and this seemed like the best solution. The spine book cloth is the long-lamented (no longer produced) duo book cloth in brick, and the title and my press logo are stencilled on with a Cricut-cut stencil, and gold paint.

The endbands are fine! (But I've gotten a lot better in the intervening two years.) They're sewn with scrap 16/2 weaving cotton, and match better than I thought they would for all of that.

Bunnies. So many bunnies. So thematic.

(Me to my wife: "Does the rabbit in this piece of artwork from a century and a half ago say "I am an immortal cultivator who's been pining for thousands of years for my husband to be reincarnated, and also I like bunnies?" My wife: "Yes... yes it does.")

And now I'm onto working on projects for this year's exchange event (seekrit projects!) but there are a few more typeset pics under the cut.

[fantailpress]

Lise-travaganza! (MDZS)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I asked one of my favorite fic authors @veliseraptor if I could typeset a short MDZS fic for a @renegadeguild exchange. And then I asked if I could bind my 10000% favorite fic of theirs for a different Renegade exchange. And I asked if I could bind them copies of these fics, plus a couple others. And then... I didn't. UNTIL NOW.

Now presenting five* binds of Lise's MDZS fic, in collaboration with several other binders! (* really it's four binds because I forgot to take photos of one of them... oops...)

On a Narrow Road

SongXueXiao wake up with amnesia. Full leather binding with an ombré dye, and endpapers by @renato-crepaldi. This fic follows the trio on their journey as they encounter adventures and figure out who they are (both self and relation to each other), and I always associate yellow with travelogues. Art nouveau's slightly creepier side was also a key design element.

With Absolute Splendor

Jiang Cheng tries to reconcile with Wei Wuxian by forcibly planning his wedding to Lan Wangji. This goes about as well as expected. In theory this fic is about a wedding, so there's a hint of auspicious red brocade cloth and the bookcloth itself is really made of blue and red, but much like in the fic, Jiang Cheng manages to make it much more about him and so the red/blue turns into purple and there are lotus motifs all over. Typeset by @humanalias.

This World Is Gonna Break Your Heart

Jiang Yanli survives but both her brothers die and now she and her child are left alone with the Jins. Ethiopian binding that is very monochrome to match the typeset, but is stitched together with purple thread to hint at what she's trying to hold on to. Typeset by @daemonluna.

If Living Can Be This

What might have happened if Xue Yang had let Song Lan live. I originally typeset and bound this in 2023, but now it was time to (finally) make an author copy! I slightly reduced the amount of gold I used in the original binding, but largely kept the same elements. This time I did a much simpler case binding instead of a springback! Typesetting notes are in the previous post.

Exposure Therapy

Wei Wuxian is scared of dogs, and Jin Ling knows the only way to fix this is with exposure therapy, obviously. I typeset this for the 2023 Renegade Tiny Books Bang, and Poky Puppy Press lovingly bound a copy for me and also for Lise! Which I then proceeded to take zero photos of. 😅 But please picture it as very small and cute.

Huge thanks to Lise for writing so very many incredible fics and continuing to be one of the best writers of Xue Yang in particular. Thank you for your patience while I finally finished all these!

And thank you to all my fellow Renegade binders who provided the typesets and/or binds, or offered encouragement and advice throughout the process.

[bookshelfdreams]

Partridge in a Pear Tree (and other stories) by Vamillepudding

“For someone who claims not to like thinking,” Edwin says, raising an eyebrow, “you do a remarkably good job of it.” Charles laughs. “Tell that to my old teachers, mate.” “If they disagree, then they can’t be very qualified.” Edwin says this simply, like it’s just a fact of life. Like it’s plainly obvious that if anyone thinks Charles is stupid, it’s they who are at fault. Or: Charles grew up poor and is likely to stay that away, his job at the magic store notwithstanding. By the time he meets Edwin, he's decided that he wants a new life. In between figuring out what's up with the mysterious wish-granting pigeons, and whether he can go to the Royal Ball, Edwin makes him want to take a chance on being happy as well.

[iris-of-the-lambs]

a book dragon, to guard your pages...

[frostedmagnolias]

Fan

c. 1770-1780

unknown maker, France

Victoria and Albert Museum

[knightswaypoint]

⚜⚔︎ And they're done!!! ⚔︎⚜

With a final push I managed to finish all the book dustjackets + instructions for the 17th Anniversary of BBC Merlin first airing!!

You can find all the digital files and instructions for free download on my Ko-fi!

If you take the time to make either the bookcloth or paper version and post about it, please do tag me! I'd love to see it 💜

(left - paper dustjacket, right - bookcloth + HTV) - More info & pics below cut!

I have each book as its own listing as there is a good amount of files (I did not zip the files because I feel weird offering them as .zips since you can't see all of the files contained in it. But if people prefer then I can certainly go through and add the zips for easier download 👍)

Each book listing includes:

► Base PSD file

► Three faux bookcloth PNG files, each with a different spine design

► One SVG file, that contains all three different spine designs

► PDF instruction / information file

Here's the PDF for easy access:

I technically already have a post with the first four books, but I'll put them here as a sort of masterpost.

Book 1 and 2!

The Dragon's Call - features the Pendragon crest, the symbols at the top and bottom of Excalibur's runes, and unbroken chains.

Valiant - features Valiant's shield, crossed swords, and the dog statue Merlin brought to life.

Book 3 and 4!

The Mark of Nimueh - features the Afanc's egg, the poultice used to save Tom, flowing water, and air and fire.

The Poisoned Chalice - features the Mortaeus flower, the Kings' two chalices, and the magic sphere that guided Arthur.

Book 5 and 6!

The Labyrinth of Gedref - features the unicorn, the arrow that killed the unicorn, water turning into sand with dying crops, and Anhora's "poisoned" goblet.

The Death of Arthur - features the Questing Beast, the cup of life, Merlin's lightning, and Nimueh's fireball.

Book 7 and 8!

The Nightmare Begins - features the Druids' symbol, magic freely flowing, the candle Morgana lit, and the vase she broke.

Lancelot and Guinevere - features the griffin, the ransom note for Gwen, and the wilddeoren.

And finally, Book 9 and 10!

The Last Dragonlord - features Kilgharrah and his flames, Balinor's wooden dragon, Balinor's cave, and broken chains.

The Traitor Within - features Cenred's crest, the dripping mandrake root, the sekret's sting, and the Rowan Staff.

And as a thanks for scrolling all the way down here, enjoy a backing peel video as well.