"Yes. Many people died in this house," Al-Haitham confirms. "Some of them are even buried on the land." And then, almost like an afterthought, he answers, "It is my house."
Maedhros wakes up again, on the first morning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
Of course, nobody calls it that. For them, it hasn't happened yet.
Approximately one million years later, here is my project from the yearly Renegade Exchange! Truly, this fic was such a pleasure to work on. I bound this one fandom blind-ish, which is to say that I had the passing familiarity with LOTR that any D&D player / child who read any fantasy she could get her hands on has. I did very much come out of this bind with a new found love for a bunch of dysfunctional elves. Love those guys, and love this incredible fic.
About the Bind
Text Block: 20/50 lb cream short grain
Endpapers: Indian Marbles in Gold/Silver on Black (~125 gsm), prepared as made endpapers
Case Style: three piece in-boards bradel binding, covered with Verona bookcloth in coal
Cover and Titling: foiled using the WRMK foil quill attachment with a Silhouette Portrait 3 and only a medium amount of swearing and threatening the vinyl cutter with bodily harm
Additional typeset pictures, as well as progress pictures and construction / design notes below the cut.
This is, far and away, the most involved bind I've done so far. That means that I have way more to say about it than I usually do, and I also have a few progress pictures (which is rare for me). So, if y'all will indulge me a little:
Typeset
The typeset was pretty standard fair, complete with my ongoing love affair with running footers. I also had a little bit of fun with footnotes on the copyright page.
Finding a good titling font was... involved. I didn't want to just use The Lord Of The Rings Font (TM), and only a few of the LOTR-inspired fonts I found did anything for me. And then, as an additional complicating factor, I had chosen to set the parenthetical portions of the chapter titles as subtitles, and let me tell you: LOTR-inspired fonts have got descenders for days. They are about 60% descenders by volume, which simply doesn't play nicely with subtitles. Got a very lucky break when a fellow binder suggested checking out uncial fonts, and eventually landed on one I really liked. I also broke my own personal rule about not using a different cap for titling vs drop caps, but I wanted something more decorative, and I found a nice uncial style illustrated drop cap that still matched pretty well.
The other design complication for title page and, more importantly, the cover, was the damn Tengwar. Now, I would absolutely describe myself as a nerd. I simply play too many table top games for that to not be true. But what I've never been is a language nerd. The first step (getting the Tengwar transcription) wasn't so hard. I used Tecendil for all of it (and if there are any transcription errors, well... I did my best). But trying to 1) find a Tengwar font that plays nicely with Affinity Publisher and 2) learn how to type correctly in that Tengwar font was.... God. That was a week long endeavor. As it turns out, there is one (1) Tengwar font that Affinity Publisher can render correctly, and that font is Alcarin Tengwar. I'm not going explain why because this post is already going to be long enough as is, but I will at least save the rest of you the trouble of the trial and error that took me.
Covers
For the cover design, I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to do from the beginning, although I did try one alternate version. As usual, all the design work was done in Affinity Designer. (This one also definitely tested my ability to work with my own vectors vs just using other people's vectors.) Regardless, I knew that I wanted to incorporate the idea of "unspooling" or "unraveling." This is a timeloop fix it fic, and I wanted to get that feeling of the new story overwriting the tragedy of the old.
With the importance of Maedhros being able to save Fingon within the story, I keyed in on the moment in The Silmarillion where he dies and foiled those lines in silver:
At last Fingon stood alone with his guard dead about him; and he fought with Gothmog, until another Balrog came behind and cast a thong of fire about him. Thus fell the High King of the Noldor, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood.
Now, the moment I pulled from A Thread Unraveled isn't exactly the same moment, but it is the moment in the fic where I think Fingon is saved for good within the loops:
He deserves to live. He is valiant, and good, and I know that he deserves more than death as his reward. He deserves everything I can give him and more, and he doesn't end here. He cannot end here. Please. See us. See what we have become. I know I have done wrong. I know there is so much I can never make right. I know it. But I am trying. I love him, and I am trying. He loves me, and so I am trying. Is it enough? If you are listening, if you can hear me, please. Have mercy for the Eldar and their love. In the darkness of his mind he sees silver, and blue. The stars as they first emerge in the dusk sky. As Grond reaches the highest point of the swing, Fingon so small on the ground beneath him, Thorondor appears out of the breaking clouds and dives for Morgoth’s face.
And besides, "Have mercy for the Eldar and their love" is a line that really stuck with me after reading the fic. This section is what I foiled onto the cover in gold. High concept design? A bit. But I gotta have fun somehow.
The actual covers were foiled using my Silhouette and a fine tip WRMK foil pen. I messed up two transfers over the course of making three books, but I didn't run out of foil OR bookcloth, so [through gritted teeth] that's fine.
The Text Block
Ah, the text block. Now this is where we started to get a bit fancy with it. After the usual round of glue, rounding, and backing, I started experimenting with some edge decoration techniques. One of my guiding design principles for this bind was the idea of light: this is a story that's preoccupied with finding the light in the darkness in both a philosophical sense and in the very physical "finding a Silmaril" sense. So I had in my head this image of sort of iridescent blue edges. The problem was getting there.
I settled on acrylic inks for my color, mostly because I was scared of accidentally gluing a text block closed with acrylic paint. In general, I have actually really liked working with inks. My method still needs some refinement to eliminate the tendency for inks feather a little into the pages, but they produce incredibly vibrant colors. That said, at least at my local craft store, there weren't any blue metallic inks. And even if there were, that's glittery, not necessarily iridescent. To get myself the rest of the way there, I started playing around with a colorshift acrylic glaze.
IF YOU'D LIKE TO SEE PROGRESS PICTURES FOR THE COLORSHIFT GLAZE, PLEASE CLICK ON THIS IMGUR LINK. TUMBLR KEEPS FLAGGING THESE IMAGES AS EXPLICIT FOR REASONS THAT ARE ABSOLUTELY BEYOND ME.
Now this is a really interesting material that I'm looking forward to experimenting with more. The pictures above are from my test block with the glaze layered over black ink. With all of the edges, I watered the glaze down with some distilled water (mostly due to the aforementioned terror of gluing my text block closed—I still took the block out of the press and fanned it immediately after application). I was reasonably happy with the results, but the problem I consistently ran into is that if you just look at the edges dead on, you don't really get the effect. The light has to hit them just right. (It also makes these edges a pain to try to photograph.) Additionally, this glaze sheds glitter like a motherfucker. I contained the glitter with a coat of watered down acrylic medium, but my success rate with that was variable. Some of the edges turned out great, some of them got a bit cloudy. That might be my stupid glossy acrylic medium at play again, or maybe something else entirely. More experimentation needed.
At any rate, some of them turned out better than others. This is one of the actual text blocks, with the glaze layered over a prussian blue acrylic ink. On the whole, I'm happy with the results, they just aren't quite as eyecatching as I was hoping.
The last new technique I tried out on this bind was handsewn endbands. I've had the materials for a while, but actually figuring out the process intimdiated me for a while, so I'd been putting it off. Turns out that they're actually not too hard to do!
These are faux double core endbands sewn with two strands of embroidery floss held together over a leather core. Lots of little mistakes, especially on my personal copy (which I did first... so that I could make all of my mistakes on it), but very happy with the results.
And that's all I've got to say! I worked on these pretty much non stop for three months, and I'm very proud of them and also very glad they're done. On to the next project!
This book has reached its recipient, so I can share pictures now! This is Deadset by @pbaintthetb, an amazing Nie Huaisang fic in which Nie Huaisang is murdered and becomes a tgcf-style ghost.
I did a kintsugi-look binding for a different calamity au (ironically, one in which Jin Guangyao was the ghost) but spoilers, this was the fic that I first thought of using it for. And while my first attempt was just a surface design on the cover, I built this into the structure of the book itself. The cover structure is inspired by Ben Elbel's "pixel binding" which is a book cover made of many tiny squares; using irregular pieces here makes it not quite as flexible, but I'm still very happy with the effect.
The individual sections of the cover were glued to a thin, flexible paper, then covered with a decorative paper that I worked down into the spaces between (definitely use paste rather than pva for this). The gold is deco foil, often called toner-reactive foil but it adheres to dry pva as well, so I simply filled the channels with pva and then applied the foil using the head of a pin to apply pressure (you don't need heat when applying it to pva).
For the rounded spine, I used leather pieces so that I could still have the thickness but they would be flexible enough that I wouldn't have to sacrifice the irregular shapes.
The way Ben Elbel builds his pixel binding books is the textblock is wrapped in a suede cover, basically like a paperback but suede, and then the pixel binding cover is glued to the suede at the spine. I'm not sure that duplicating this construction was necessary here, but it worked out well enough. The suede-covered textblock is an interesting look and feel all by itself actually.
In my defense, I knew exactly what I was getting into. I just didn’t realize how much it would grow from my initial plan to what it ended up being. This is the third of my @fanartfrenzy binds, for the square "fic in my most recent fandom".
The Brooklyn Boys by @buckets-and-trees is a fun story. It starts in two places: one set of stories that are Steve Rogers x Reader, and the other set that are Bucky Barnes x Reader. Two sets of completely sweet little stories that you don’t realize are part of the same world until about five stories in.
And it’s not until about seven stories in that you realize that the Reader in both stories is the same person.
Now that I’ve spoiled you on the Big Reveal (sorry about that, unfortunately necessary to understand why I bound the stories the way I did), hopefully you can see why it would be a kick to bind.
(Please note that this post is long and image-heavy, so the rest will be under the cut.)
Since the stories start in two different places, it makes sense for the book to start in two different places, too, right? Right. I knew I wanted it to look like a normal book—though a double-sided one, with one side of the book containing Steve’s stories, and the other side, Bucky’s. So one side of the book looks like the picture above, with the yellow cover and grey spine, but the other:
Open either side and you’ll get Steve’s track on Steve’s side, and Bucky’s track on his. Get to the end of those tracks, and you find instructions to either flip and read the other track, or open to continue reading.
Here’s where it gets fun. The next story, Interlude, is where the two tracks converge, and this is where the reader should realize that the two tracks were in the same world all along. I wanted to convey that sort of “flipping” of the narrative by having the stories literally go in an unexpected and different direction—hence why you have to turn the book 90 degrees to continue reading.
And then… you literally just turn the page.
So the stories continue… still kind of on their separate tracks. We’ve got Steve’s and Bucky’s stories, running parallel but in full view. But you have to read both of them now to get to…
Steve and the Blindside is where it all comes together, when the reader (and Steve and Bucky) realize that the Reader character is the same person. It’s presented a little differently from the others, obviously, but you can’t access it unless you’ve read both Steve and Bucky’s lead-ins. And once you have read it, you reveal…
This, the final piece of the puzzle, where everything comes together. One volume, with all the remaining stories. And, on the flip side… the author’s commentary on how she came to write the story in this way.
*****
Let’s talk about the choices I made in how I bound all of this. I wasn’t originally going to make it this complicated; my original plan was to have the stories start from either end, and then once they meet in the middle, just keep going in that direction. I wasn’t sure how to make that happen, though, and in my searching trying to figure out what to do, I came across secret compartment books. I also realized that I had the base for a secret compartment book already: namely, a hardcover of HP and the Chamber of Secrets with a spine broken in three different places. Despite the fact that I don’t want copies of HP in my house anymore, I’m not a big fan of wasting something that could prove to be useful. Donating a broken copy of CoS would end up with it in the recycling bin, since the thrift store is unlikely to sell a book that’s falling to pieces. Wouldn’t turning it into something else be better? (You know. Transforming it, as it were. Yeah, terrible joke, very sorry, will delete if someone requests.) Plus, the Bucky storyline has a HP element in it, in that Bucky and the Reader character bond over HP. Using CoS as a base for this bind seemed like a good idea to me!
Which is how I decided: the broken textblocks, with one side hiding a tiny book holding the end of the story, would be CoS, and I’d build on them with the pieces leading up to that. I worked my way from the end to the beginning, binding first the tiny book (a quarto, incidentally), and including an extra-long ribbon on the spine. I then carved out the cavity in the largest of the CoS textblocks, using glue on the exposed edges (both inside and out) to give it stability. I glued the other end of the tiny book’s ribbon to the back of the hole in the textblock, then covered it with the same paper that I used for covering the tiny book, creating my hidden space. Done!
After that, I started working my way up. It took a while to think of how to lay out Blindside so that it stretched across both sides of the textblocks, but didn’t get destroyed when the textblocks were folded. I think figuring this step out was the very last thing I did—I had plans for nearly everything else—and I really like how it turned out, with the story coming from two places but needing to be read together.
Blindside, Shelves, and Ballet, are all pamphlet-bound, with a single signature sewn directly to their covers. I also included an extra piece of cardstock, folded the opposite way, which serves as a sort of anchor to the books. It’s the anchor that is glued to the texblock, and allows the reader to flip the books to the side after reading. I figured this was probably the safest way to attach the stories to the textblock, so they don’t fall out or end up in the wrong order.
All of this is hidden behind Interlude—which I’ll talk about now, but bear in mind, it was the last piece of the puzzle to be assembled. I was able to print Interlude as a single-page broadsheet on legal paper, using an accordion fold so that it would hide when the book is closed, but be fully visible once open. It’s pasted on either end to manila folders, which in turn are pasted to the textblocks. The part of the paper that is not pasted to the folders are backed by another piece of cardstock, so that they’re a little easier to read, and hopefully to prevent tearing or accidental incorrect folds.
With that done, I focused on the beginning of the story. Both Steve and Bucky’s tracks are technically perfectbound, because I needed to match the CoS textblock, and those measurements are 6x9, which is bigger than I could do as a signature with my printer. I also decided to go with perfectbound because CoS is perfectbound, and this would help match that a little better.
But in the end, I actually did stitch the pages, in a sort of single-stitch line a quarter inch from the spine, because I was worried that only having glue wouldn’t stand up to the excessive handling they would receive. (Turns out I didn’t take a picture of this—whoops. And it’s not really visible any longer either, but if Aspen looks closely when she lifts the cover, she might be able to see it.)
This ended up being super beneficial, because it gave me an anchor when attaching the covers.
About the covers:
So like I said, I used the CoS textblocks for the interior of the book. (And they’re all there, except for maybe a page or two, plus I added extra so that both sides of the book are even when it’s fully open, which lets the Interlude lay flat. I got through almost all of my misprints, yay.)
The head and endboards are the actual CoS covers as well. After separating the textblock from the cover, I cut off the original spine (which was going to be far too narrow for this, not to mention it was too rounded for my plan), and used the boards as the boards for this book. Because I needed the book to open flat, I decided to go with a secret Belgian binding… but I altered it a little bit, since I needed both sides to be readable before you actually open the book all the way, otherwise you risk tearing the booklets inside.
So, there’s actually five parts to the cover: the head- and endboards, the spine, and then what I started calling the inserts. And as luck turned out, the boards were exactly the width I needed so that the seam between them and the inserts was right where I’d done my reinforcement stitching.
I bound the head and endboards in the paper—blue for Bucky’s side, yellow for Steves, and the marblelized blue-and-yellow for the inside, and then a grey bookcloth for the inserts and spine. Black HTV and a Cricut machine did the spine decoration, and I bore the holes with this nifty tool that I found at Michaels, and worked like a charm. Then I sewed the whole thing together with embroidery thread.
Now came time to put the whole thing together. I stitched the seam between the head/endboards and the inserts to my reinforcement line, weaving back and forth to create a nice, solid connection. Once done on both sides, the book was assembled.
Mostly. Now that could lay it flat, I could paste in Interlude, and then it was finally done.
The whole thing took about two months, from the moment I started working on the layouts, to the minute I finished pasting on the cover decoration. The hardest part was trying to figure out how it would all go together, but I am so ridiculously pleased with the final result (despite my many, many misprints, and many, many mistakes, and many, many things I would fix if I were to do it again). I had so much fun trying to figure out this puzzle of a presentation, and how to do it in a way that would make sense for both the story and for a reader who might not know what to expect.
I loved doing every single part of this project. I am itching to do another secret compartment book again. (I have six more HP books, if anyone’s game to let me destroy another!) I almost want to do it again, to see if I can’t fix what I fucked up, and I also never want to do it again, because this was easily the most difficult project I’ve done to date. I am thrilled beyond words with the result.
(Things I learned: pick a book that is thick enough—if I did this again, I’d probably go with OotP so I don’t have to add more to even out the sides. Be more careful laying in the pamphlets; Bucky and the Shelves runs a bit close to Blindside, which makes it difficult to open the latter. And think double hard before doing the titles—I messed up and had to patch the cover to Bucky’s track, which was extra annoying because I had a limited amount of that paper and it took weeks to even find a good color match.)
In case you need more visual: here’s a video of the book, and me showing how it works.
Thanks for reading! Thanks so much to Aspen for her amazing story and for giving me permission to bind it. I’m happy to answer any other questions people may have.
I recently completed my bind of the wonderful wildfire by @butdriampagliacci! The cover art was commissioned by the author, and I received permission to use it; the spine is a modified version of the design from TheCottagePress on Etsy, which I purchased the SVG file for (it was hard to find any graphics of flames that were both long enough and not too childish-looking). This bind was a lot of firsts for me, including actually making a post online about it, apparently. Whoops!
It was also my first time printing on bookcloth, and I'm pretty happy with the results, though the process wasn't without some mishaps.
More pictures below!
At first I wasn't sure what direction to take with the design, but after being shown the cover art and getting permission to try using it for my binding, I decided to lean into the red and blue theming with the endbands, endpapers, and the bookmark ribbons.
Just the typeset itself took like 2-3mos because I kept having to redo it as I learned more things I'd been doing wrong (or at least doing inefficiently) this whole time. The amount of things I learned about kerning alone... That's the fun of an amateur hobby though, and I feel like if I hadn't been working on a typeset while I got to know about these things, I wouldn't have remembered them anyway.
As for the covers, printing them wasn't so much of an issue -- I just cut the bookcloth (Cialux in white) down to letter size and my new inkjet handled it just fine. It wasn't quite as saturated as it would be on paper, but it still looks pretty good. The problem was that it could (and in one case did) get scratched pretty easily, so I ended up having to figure out how to coat it for protection. I ended up using Golden Archival Varnish Spray because our local Michaels had it, and it worked, but applying it was its own ordeal.
It was January when I did this, and the spray prefers warmer temps (also no direct sunlight) for application, so I ended up having to do it in my garage. I wore a respirator but the smell followed me back into the house, which was pretty unpleasant. Thankfully it did dissipate from the books themselves after a few days. I also had to smooth down the covers with a gloved hand after each application, or else there would be this white frosted layer of fuzzy fibers. I did 4 coats total, and if I had more time I probably would have done the full 6, but 4 was enough to make it more scratch-resistant.
This bind was also the first time I did graphite edges. I thought it would be a good fit for the bind, to invoke the look of charcoal. That had its own learning curve, but the end results are pleasantly shiny, and worth all the sanding that I had to do to get there!
I made 4 copies total: one experimental dud copy, one for a local friend, one for me, and one for the author. The dud copy also ended up being adopted by a different friend.
My Oct-Jan was pretty much entirely taken up by this bind and the other gifts I was making for Christmas, so I'm taking February off now to give my poor arms a chance to recover. Hopefully I've got a couple more ficbinding projects in me for 2026, but I'm pretty slow at these things, so who knows?
I have a billion photos and projects and I need to update this blog more often.
But since I apparently can't post anything serious lately, here's the result of a series of tests I made. First time using adhesive vinyl cut with my Silhouette, repurposing old cardboard packages and the cheapest bookcloth I could find on Aliexpress (if you can avoid it, I recommend avoiding it. Seriously. This bookcloth was a nightmare.)
Also, my new "method for trimming" doesn't work at all. I'm going to buy myself a guillotine for my birthday, I think.
Endpages are the lyrics of Never Gonna Give You Up, printed in mirrored Sankofa Display font. It's a REALLY lousy notebook, okay? 😅
Everyone's all "ohhh 2026 bring back physical media" until I start talking illuminated manuscripts and then suddenly we're not on the same page anymore
