Amateur bookbinder, fanbinder Member of Renegade Bindery I do not accept money for binding—I bind in the joy of fandom, to give back to creators the joy they have given me.
Are you all ready for this? This is maybe the prettiest book in the entire batch of 12. I've made some damn pretty books but this one? Oh my god. Look:
This is Innocuous by flamethrower and it is a canon-compliant, post-s1 Good Omens fic from 2019. Without getting too spoilery, Heaven and Hell are getting up to mischief again and our favorite pair are not nearly as at-liberty as they think. They have to think their way out of a trap that they don't even realize at first that they're in.
Alright, for cover materials we have lineco tan book cloth on the spine, textured turquoise cardstock for the base, chiyogami with a floral mosaic pattern for the ornamental parts, and gold foil HTV for the title. I included two photos to show off how shiny it is. The chiyogami is actually a couple of scraps from way back when I bound The Rose and the Serpent back in 2024. I used it for the endpapers in that one and this is nearly every bit of what was left. There's more on the back, so have a look under the cut!
This is the back. It was a painstaking process to cut this out with a fine-bladed xacto knife but it was worth every second. The scraps I had were identical, but it was really important to me that the front and back were not the same, and this is what I landed on. The cover (and the endpapers too, when we get to those) were inspired by a scene later in the fic when Crowley is showing off a rooftop garden paradise that he's made. This seemed like the kind of cool, lush, luxurious thing he might have in there. And I have to say it exceeded my wildest expectations. I didn't know I had it in me to make this.
And then the HTV got warped going onto the spine and I ended up with a wonky "o". We must remain humble. It's honestly still lovely though, I forgot it was there until I started writing up this post. I got a very good round on this text block, almost no swell (even after rounding, my books often have some swell, though it's only noticeable when I stack them). And the endbands came out unusually well. Those are, as always, custom made. They look good with the cover, though they were designed to match the endpapers:
These are that thick soft artisan paper that Joanne's used to sell. The gold bits are shiny foil. Again, secret rooftop Eden luxury vibe here. I have no regrets about this bind, though if I had it to do over again I might choose a solid color instead of a pattern here. Maybe. Maybe not. On the one hand I really like the pattern but on the other it is kind of a lot with the cover.
Couple of quick shots of the interior. I kept it a bit simple, honestly, which makes a nice contrast with the cover. That wasn't intentional but I can't say it doesn't fit. Feels balanced. Let's see, what else? There are, I kid you not, over 450 footnotes in this fic and those took some wrangling to get in line. I think that's the most footnotes I've ever dealt with in one story. Oh, and there's an extra chapter at the end which is a deleted scene that I had to track down on the author's other fanfic account (listed in the notes at the top of the fic) because they'd removed it from Ao3. It's public, it just needed a bit of extra leg work.
And there we have it! This was one of the earliest long fics I ever read and it is really pleasing to give it the fanbinding treatment. It was interesting rereading it after several years and seeing how trends had shifted in things like characterization and the types of plots chosen. I'm not sure if that's a wider fandom trend or a shift in my reading taste or both. Gave me some perspective, anyway.
It's been a couple of days since the last one so I've got another book to show off today. It's not immediately obvious from the photo but this is Car Trouble by summerofspock, and it's a Good Omens human!AU in which Aziraphale is a college professor and Crowley is a mechanic. If you are in the fandom and you haven't read this I beg you to do it immediately. It's wonderful, does not seem like it should work but absolutely does. And it's hot. Really hot.
The photos in this post are a tad overexposed (I think? I do not know photography) but the cover material is a homemade book cloth in a brown tweed pattern, because I thought that was professor-y. It's a garment fabric so it's softer than a purpose-made book cloth. We've got silver photo corners for protection against wear, and black skivertex faux leather on the spine. In the past I've had largely poor results putting HTV on homemade book cloth no matter what kind of cloth I start with, so I elected not to put a title on the front. I'm relying on the corners to give it some visual interest as well as protection.
More photos under the cut!
We do have a title on the spine though! That is pewter foil HTV and I thought it would be fun to make it vertical. I have done that a couple of times, but not all titles are suited for it and it doesn't fit the vibe for every fic. Here, however, it echoes some of the choices I made in the typeset, so I seized the opportunity.
Top view, showing off the shiny gray ribbon bookmark and the handmade endbands. The colors really are not shining through; they are chocolate brown and silver-gray stripe. It's a single core, very basic, and that's on purpose. This story is a lot less...frilly? flourish-y? than many others I have bound. I'm not sure those are the right words. It's hard to explain but a more tailored, less elaborate approach just seemed like the right choice. So the endbands are simple, the fonts are sans serif, the cover is less elaborate, and even the corner caps are a simpler design than the other choices I had on hand. It's a nice book, quality materials, feels good in the hand, but you have to meet it where it's at and understand what went into it to appreciate that. Given some of the story's themes I think that's fitting.
Alright, enough philosophy, let's look inside! The endpapers are cardstock, gray with this metallic gold circle overlay. I kind of wish I'd done an in-fill so the turn-in was less obvious under them, but I almost never do those so I didn't think of it till it was too late. It was hard matching anything with the cover material. My endpaper choices tend towards florals, highly-patterned chiyogami, and abstract marbles and none of those felt right, but plain ones would have been too understated. These were the right balance, though in hindsight I do wish they were silver instead of gold. Oh well.
Remember when I said Crowley is a mechanic in this? Yeah. He's dirty and it's hot. So we've got this streaky graphic I found on rawpixel that is probably supposed to be paint but to me looks like oil. I've got the whole thing on the title page and just the top part on the first page of each chapter, so it doesn't obscure the text. I tend to make my chapter headers kind of simple, which is fine but can get a little same-y when you do as many as I have, so I got a very little bit experimental with this one and made them vertical. The vertical spine title is echoing this. Gives the whole thing some cohesion. I love it.
And there we have it! I know I always say this but I am really proud of this one. The details are maybe sparse but they come together really nicely into the whole, and as I said above it just feels really nice to hold. It has a very high bookishness to it. The qualities that contribute to that are harder to pinpoint than colors or graphics though. It is very square (low spine swell), it has a nice sharp hinge crease, lines are very straight and not slanted, and the spine covering extends the same distance on the front and back. I feel like it is a technical success as well as an aesthetic one.
Thank you @snek-panini I think I actually saw this one in a reasonable timeframe.
Last song: Simply Red’s Holding Back the Years from a 1986 Casey Kasem top 40 I was listening to with my sister.
Currently watching: Nothing, last watched was GO3, but we won’t discuss that.
Current obsession: Still Good Omens.
Currently reading: Crocodile on the Sandbank 🐊 by Elizabeth Peters. It’s been awhile but I’m rereading her Amelia Peabody series. I used to read them every summer.
Currently working on: Finishing up my FTH, FFWAD and personal book commitments. I’m so slow.
Last google search: the radio station to listen to Casey Kasem
No pressure, but if you’d like to share, please do! @emotional-support-demon-crowley @curiouspupsicle @kneelbeforeyourdogbabylon
I have a two-part set of books to share with you all today! This is Divine Restorations and Repairs by skimmingthesurface and SylWritesStuff, and it's one very long fic that I split into two volumes for binding. It is a Good Omens human!AU in which Aziraphale runs a business restoring antiques and Crowley has just gotten out of prison and is looking for somewhere to belong. It's a slow burn with excellent characterization and you'll see significant appearances from all our Season 1 faves (it wrapped up in 2021 so no S2). Go give it a read but be warned, you may lose the rest of your day to it.
Apologies but I neglected to get a photo with both covers in one shot so you have to deal with separate ones. Up there on the cover we have skivertex white faux leather and lineco oatmeal on the spine and corners. I added the green ribbon late in the game to cover the seam. The logo is made up of elements from the Noun Project and cut out in gold foil HTV. I do a lot of things in dark colors so this one was something of a departure. I wanted it to be fussy and pale and old-fashioned, like Aziraphale, and I think I nailed it.
More photos under the cut!
Alright, there will be more photos but first I have to go on a rant about the lineco oatmeal because it SUCKS. I use their products a lot because they're cheap and accessible and usually I have no issues. This cloth has a different texture than most, I think it was called linen finish? It's toothy, nicely rough in the hands, and visually similar to the Italian book cloth that Hollander's sells. But I can buy this from Blick and not have to pay shipping. Win-win, right? No. Wrong. The Italian is so vastly superior that I won't be buying this again. It's really, really stiff, stiffer than buckram or cardstock or anything else I've used. It frays like a bitch no matter which way you cut it, that's why the ribbons were necessary to hide the seam. When I had to fold the cover back to tuck in the spine turn-in the backing material actually cracked at the hinge. I didn't know that was possible and have certainly never had it happen before. This stuff is awful. Don't bother with it.
Okay. Rant over. Have some more photos:
Spines and endbands! I love to do this trick with the spines, where the title is spread over multiple volumes, but it takes the right kind of title to do it so I don't always get the chance. They're very shiny and didn't want to photograph but they are very pretty in person. And for the endbands I chose double cores that I wove in the aromantic flag pattern. The word "aromantic" doesn't appear in the fic, but the authors did clarify in some of their notes that they intentionally wrote Crowley to be on the aro spectrum and I thought it would be fun to make a direct nod to that. And it became a bit of a recurring motif with...
...the endpapers! These are Renato Crepaldi marbles. Sometimes you have to spring for the good stuff. As soon as I saw them I thought of this bind and the aro flag colors. It would not be inaccurate to say that the rest of the bind was built around them. Aziraphale in this specializes in antique book repair (because of course he does) and a lot of design choices flowed from that. Marbled paper is a highly traditional bookbinding material, and the choice to do corner caps also came from here. You may have noticed that the ribbon bookmark is a deep brown, and that was chosen to match these endpapers even though black would have fit the aro theme better.
Ok, let's get inside:
The title page and the table of contents. Crowley, as it turns out, is sitting on a secret: he used to repair clocks. There's a plot-important grandfather clock in the story, so the title page stems from that. I tend to do very center-oriented title pages so this one was fun. And we have old books again on the contents page. Both images are from rawpixel, and both books have the same graphics.
I was able to retain the authors' chapter summaries this time around. A lot of older books have chapter titles that run on really long, and I thought it would be fun to nod to that here and add to the old world feel. And we have ornaments in the footer! Those are clock hands! Again, from rawpixel. I grabbed them from an ink drawing of a clock face. I also used them for a scene break image, though I didn't take a photo of that. It's like the first page ornaments, but there's no gap between them. It's adorable.
And that's that! I had so much fun doing this one and the concept I think really shines through. None of the details would make sense on any other book but this fic makes them all hang together.
Alright, I've got the first of many new projects to share today! This is a custom binding of on the same page, a Good Omens human!AU by Chekhov, in which Aziraphale and Crowley are both authors (one of religious literature, the other of smutty romances) who not only write parts of each others' books but also for the duration of the fic are pretending to be married so one of them can land a book deal. There's so much pining, friends. Pining all over the place. I even put pines on the cover.
We have skivertex green faux leather up there on the cover, for the spine and fore edge. I originally intended to do corner caps but I like this look better and it's easier to measure. Lots of long vertical lines. Title is in pewter HTV and no, I still have not learned my lesson about weeding swirly fonts. I will never learn. I wanted it to look like a romance novel with literary pretensions (this is a compliment) and it absolutely does. The tree print is scrapbook paper, though I've forgotten where I bought it. The story is set at a big fancy house in the woods in Vermont, so it's perfect.
Have a look under the cut for more photos!
Photo of the spine, in which the swirly script font persists. I really wanted this book to be a flatback but it had just a bit too much swell, so it got rounded. The bookmark is dark gray, matching the htv, and the endbands are handmade. The leather extends further on one side than the other, I know. We are none of us perfect. It's damn cute though.
The endband colors were chosen to match these endpapers. Funny enough, they were bought for a different story. This fic is set at Christmas time, though it isn't actually about Christmas, so these ones with more of a winter motif were a good fit (better than they would have been for the story I bought them for, which was overtly a Christmas Fic). This theme continues once we get inside.
The title page has a holly frame. The setting is strong in this fic, out in the woods and kind of cozy, so it felt right to use a lot of greenery.
The image on the left up there, with the pinecones, originally had a twee little scene with a horse-drawn carriage in the middle. It was adorable but didn't suit the story, and that frame was too good to pass up, so I edited it out and put this quote from the author's Chapter 1 summary in there. None of the other chapters had the kind of summary that would work for this, but I thought this one worked really well to set the scene, so it's the only one I kept. And we have more holly in the frame around the chapter numbers. I grayed this one out so it wouldn't fight with the text. It was a little dominating when I had it in black. This softened it up. All the images are via rawpixel and in the public domain.
And that's that! The first of many. Hope you liked!
For @kneelbeforeyourdogbabylon / anna_bird an edition of her wonderful series Sins of Knowledge. It’s a rollercoaster of a human au featuring mad science, bodily transformations, evil corporations and a thrilling plot that kept me guessing the entire time.
I chose to focus on the mad science aspect and it felt very teal which worked beautifully with the holographic and silver for the cover.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful stories! And I hope you enjoy this edition.
I'm writing again! I have a Good Omens series 3 rewrite on the stairs, 4,000 words in and growing! Just thought I'd share! :)
On a side note, I don't often plug my Patreon, especially since I slowed down SO much in my writing in the last couple of years, but now that I'm producing more again, here's me timidly venturing a mention of it? If you've ever wanted to throw a little support my way, I would absolutely love and be so grateful to have more supporters on my Patreon! That thing is set up for recurring monthly donations, but if a one-time thing is more your thing, you can always find me on PayPal, too, at [email protected] (old school email, haha!). :) No pressure, seriously! Just if you've ever suddenly thought that you'd love to do that. :P
Another FTH for @ack-emma. First up is The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate Collection, featuring two of her own works as well as @tawnyontumblr’s The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate. Individual story links below. Emma wanted wedgwood blue and this is as close as I could come, and it works beautifully with this paper I had. I’ll post separately about Th Counter-Arrangement.
Becoming Aziraphale Eastgate is the backstory for Aziraphale’s awful marriage. Mind the tags, there is a happy ending just not in this particular fic. But it does end on a hopeful note.
The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate is a particular favorite of mine and I posted about it here when I made Tawny’s edition.
💬 1 🔁 21 ❤️ 58 · Another of my favorites from @tawnyontumblr is The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate. (It reminds me of Knaves Wager, by Loretta C
And the beautiful sequel A Nightingale in Berkeley Square where Crowley becomes jealous of one of Aziraphale’s servants, which is hilarious.
Also included for @ack-emma is her series The Counter-Arrangement, another fabulous Regency story with Pepper and Adam matchmaking their parents, femme Aziraphale and Crowley. My wonderful daughter drew the cover art for me. Emma suggested yellow and I wanted to include the pineapple flower.
Another FTH for @ack-emma. First up is The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate Collection, featuring two of her own works as well as @tawnyontumblr’s The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate. Individual story links below. Emma wanted wedgwood blue and this is as close as I could come, and it works beautifully with this paper I had. I’ll post separately about Th Counter-Arrangement.
Becoming Aziraphale Eastgate is the backstory for Aziraphale’s awful marriage. Mind the tags, there is a happy ending just not in this particular fic. But it does end on a hopeful note.
The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate is a particular favorite of mine and I posted about it here when I made Tawny’s edition.
💬 1 🔁 21 ❤️ 58 · Another of my favorites from @tawnyontumblr is The Ineffable Mrs Eastgate. (It reminds me of Knaves Wager, by Loretta C
And the beautiful sequel A Nightingale in Berkeley Square where Crowley becomes jealous of one of Aziraphale’s servants, which is hilarious.
Sumo tournament starts this weekend! Please enjoy this Aziraphale as a sumo wrestler art that @hollow-head drew for me but never posted themself. I love it VERY MUCH!!!!!
some people don’t deserve fanfics, much less for free.
also even if authors didn’t tag any specific warnings but they used the “creator chose not to use archive warnings” tag, then that is your warning.
“omg you should’ve —” no one forced your entitled ass to read anything. fanfic writers write for themselves and their own enjoyment. if you don’t like what you’re reading, quietly leave. ao3 is not an airport. no one cares about your departure so no need to announce it.
#fanfic#I mean#what’re y’all thinkin’ the E means out there#Expressive?#Excellent?#Energetic?#and ffs#do you return a book you buy the moment it has smut?#y’all think that just because you’re given the mode to communicate#it gives you leave to say ALL THE THINGS#don’t. just. DON’T.
@ishipanarmada these are too good to leave in the tags
#do you return a book you buy the moment it has smut? My brethren, sistren and themren in Christ, let me tell you the tale of the bookstore clerk to whom I was once married, whose shop sold exclusively SF and mystery, not genres notorious for prudishness (at least by the 80s). They had a Frequent Flyer who more than once actually ORDERED A BOOK through the store and then huffed back in to demand his money back because it contained "salacious material." (His wife, a cipher notorious for vapidity, was inevitably standing at his elbow during these exchanges.) So yeah... that's a thing that has happened.
I remember someone commenting elsewhere that published books should have a tagging system like AO3, exactly because of situations like this, but I guess nothing you can do is going to help some people.
