Hello! My name is Desmothene, or Des. I'm a fanbinder, and a member of Renegade Bookbinding Guild! (@renegadeguild) What this means is that I have sworn myself to Renegade's Code of Conduct in how I conduct my binding practices.
I mostly bind works of fanfiction for myself and their authors (and sometimes as gifts for friends). If you're interested in learning how to bookbind for fannish purposes yourself, please check out Renegade for free help, resources, and community!
If you are an author who previously declined a copy and have changed your mind or your situation has changed, feel free to reach out at any time! Any offers to send an author copy remain open indefinitely. All author copies are a gift and do NOT require any form of payment, including shipping, from the author. (pls let me make u a book? 🥺)
I do not accept fanbinding commissions (or commissions of any type at this time).
I have two imprints: Celestial Sphere Press, and Canis Sanguine Press. The '#celestial sphere press' and '#canis sanguine press' tags will get you my work for those imprints. Videos and how-to discussions are tagged with '#in progress review'. Anything to do with endbands (since I talk about them a fair bit) will be tagged with "#the dreaded endwyrm".
The Small Matter of Divinity by @coffeetailor /coffeetailor
The story was done. Binghe and Shen-bro were off on their honeymoon, Mobei-Jun was finally the actual king of the Northern Desert, they'd had their big fight and actually made some progress, and Shang Qinghua had even been allowed back into the sect. So happily ever after, right? At least, if survival and paperwork counted as happy. Then what was this shit?! Being in some rip-off 'Honey I shrunk the Cultivator' fanfiction wasn't part of the deal!
In other words, Shang Qinghua, the great master Airplane Shooting Into the Sky, overworked and underappreciated god of this universe, accidentally accepts an optional quest with no cancel option and ends up even shorter than usual. Wasn't his life dangerous enough as it was?
I made this copy as a gift for my friend @kaleidoscope-draws for a little gift exchange last year as she made me some BEAUTIFUL ART!!! PAINTED ON A CANVAS. I might just expire. Thank you friend for always being eager to chat about svsss, I appreciate you a WHOLE BUNCH. This copy is a bit different to the copy I made for @coffeetailor that FINALLY ARRIVED!! Woohoo! I hope you enjoy your book, coffee <3
This was my first set of silk endbands after buying the Entire tire silk collection from Japan. I think this means I can sew endbands for the next 100 years. I had some fun using minimal colours for this bind as I wanted the Wintry mountains piece by Gong Xian to shine as the chapter headers art. Plus I really love a cheeky peek of colour used in a bind lol.
Thank you to coffeetailor for having an open fanbinding policy, and for writing such a fun fun fic <3
A post-WW2, mermaid!Cody AU, and featuring art by @shukruut on the dust jacket and for each of the title pages which is absolutely stunning!
For this bind I finally got to pull out *two* of my marbled papers from izumin marbling, the stone wave pattern on the front and the bright marble on the inside for the endpapers, paired with duo oatmeal bookcloth. I pulled colors from the endpapers into the french double core endbands as well. Edges painted in "cloisonne orange."
for each of the three parts in this bind, I used a @shukruut artwork, and pulled a color from that art to set the chapter headers and one of the sea-creature drawings in as an accent on the summary page.
(I also found a very silly little fish as a paragraph break ^)
the combo of script font (Trafton Script) and art-deco-ish font (Onyx) is directly inspired by a 1940s yearbook on the site Fonts In Use. The script + serif font combo was very popular for this time period. Nautical paragraph breaks, chapter headers, and summary page illustrations are from Heritage Library's free public domain collection.
(I have hit the picture limit so on to the next reblog!)
A post-WW2, mermaid!Cody AU, and featuring art by @shukruut on the dust jacket and for each of the title pages which is absolutely stunning!
For this bind I finally got to pull out *two* of my marbled papers from izumin marbling, the stone wave pattern on the front and the bright marble on the inside for the endpapers, paired with duo oatmeal bookcloth. I pulled colors from the endpapers into the french double core endbands as well. Edges painted in "cloisonne orange."
for each of the three parts in this bind, I used a @shukruut artwork, and pulled a color from that art to set the chapter headers and one of the sea-creature drawings in as an accent on the summary page.
(I also found a very silly little fish as a paragraph break ^)
the combo of script font (Trafton Script) and art-deco-ish font (Onyx) is directly inspired by a 1940s yearbook on the site Fonts In Use. The script + serif font combo was very popular for this time period. Nautical paragraph breaks, chapter headers, and summary page illustrations are from Heritage Library's free public domain collection.
(I have hit the picture limit so on to the next reblog!)
The @renegadeguild hosted a Tiny Books Bang and I made these lovely octavos in a bit of a sprint over the course of three-ish weeks. I learned a lot, got to use some of my stash, and I loved flexing a creative/design muscle that I don't get to use too often in trying to figure out how to capture these fics and their gorgeous typesets as well as make three books that are each visually distinct. I took better photos of each of the books that I'll place below the cut but these two^^ are the only ones I have of all six together, with copies for both myself and the typesetters. Making copies was a really good bit of practice for me! With each one, I found myself learning a bit along the way about how I might make the next one better. I like the side by sides of both copies so that you can see that the sets are sisters and not twins.
Liquid Love Distilled by @jaggededges123 (typeset by coffee themself!!!)
Lingua Franca by @octinary (typeset by @moonlovingvampire)
Going My Way by @mylordshesacactus (typeset by @silentsunpress)
Liquid Love Distilled
I saw this fic in the slide deck for the event and knew I needed to bind it. Not only is it an obikin fic that I've read and loved before but I also found out after the fact that Coffee typeset it themself so I got to send out a copy to the author!
Water is obviously a huge component of this fic (go read it if you haven't). I think my first big design decision here was the water droplet cutout on the cover (I really love a cut-out cover, despite how fiddly they can be) because I wanted to tie in the section headers in the typeset. The bookcloth came next. I had this fabric in my stash from a quilt I made and knew it would be perfect for this. I've never properly made bookcloth before but Heat and bond and some acid free tissue paper made it extremely easy. The biggest design decision was making this book coptic bound instead of a 3-piece binding. One of the reasons for that was an attempt to make each of these books as distinct as possible from the others but another part of me also felt like this style with the exposed spine worked well for the fic. Anakin spends the fic trying to court Obi-Wan through water starting with simply offering him a glass of it to drawing him a bath. I feel like the exposed stitching on the coptic binding sort of shows the hand made work/love that goes into creating something. Maybe there is also something about the exposed thread binding everything together that is especially romantic too. The last piece here was decorating the cover. I wanted to reference the bath that Anakin gives to Obi-Wan with the gold spices and blue flowers.
Lingua Franca
I hadn't read this fic before signing up to bind it but it's an adorable Geraskier fic centered around a potion that allows one person to hear another person's thoughts.
I knew what I wanted to do with this bind almost from the very beginning. After taking a look at my stash, I had some bookcloth and paper that really stood out to me when I thought about the Witcher. I think a lot of this process for me is about the vibe that I get from a particular book. In this case, that meant warm tones (the brown and the forest green of the end papers) as well as the slightly more flamboyant raspberry color on the covers (I love this paper and I haven't been able to use it yet, it has such a great texture with the embedded strands of fiber and the random brush strokes of gold (not a mistake I made but a feature of the paper)). The blue came in slightly later in the design process. Blue is kind of an important color to the fic (the potion is blue for a start) so I wanted to incorporate it into the design and I feel like the additional stripe provides a nice bit of visual interest to the cover, making it a little less basic and straightforward. Like the previous book, I knew that I wanted to tie in the bottle image from the typeset into the bind. You can see from the pictures at the start of this post that one of these has the bottle in the center of the cover while the beauty copy that I sent out has it slightly off-center on the lower corner. Sisters, not twins. I decided I liked the off-center version better once I had finished the scrap copy (mine). You can let me know whether you agree!
Going My Way?
This is another fic I had not read before signing up to bind it but I definitely ship Barrissoka and was interested in discovering new fic! This fic is a really cute one where Ahsoka and Barriss have never met but run into each other on two separate missions for the Jedi. Ahsoka is undercover, Barriss is hiding her identity to protect some younglings, mistaken identity shenanigans ensue.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with this bind at first but it became potentially one of my favorite things I have ever designed. After looking through my stash, I decided on the blue bookcloth first (I had a lot of it and it seemed a safe bet) and I had some starry scrapbook papers I thought might come in handy. The real breakthrough came with the chevron shape. I thought it could kind of be an arrow alluding to the title, sort of pointing the way (let me know if that's a stretch 😅). I had the idea of a kind of fishtail braid with little strips of paper (and then needed to draw several sketches to make sure that what I was envisioning in my head would actually work in reality). I liked the idea of a blue and green color palette for Barriss and Ahsoka but didn't really have any paper to go with that idea so I painted some strips of scrapbook paper to look like the pattern of Ahsoka's lekku and Barriss's tattoos with watercolor. Braiding the two of them together visually represents the way that they connect with each other in the fic. The limb I went out on with this design was in sewing my own endbands for the first time. I'm not sure that I totally have the hang of it yet (you're definitely not supposed to see the scrap threads in the bottom bead of the band) but I like the look of the blue and green together and they definitely improved as I moved from head to tail on both books. I might need to get some better thread and try again.
I had such a great time with these binds and the support from the discord!
Some (very) mini bookbinding for @obikin-valentine-exchange !
I typeset and bound @jaggededges123 's To Win A Heart . It was the perfect fic for this scale and for some neat knight-themed text ornaments. The fic feels so rich and the exchange between Obi-Wan and Anakin is so sweet and tender even in such a relatively small scale. I knew that I wanted to do something similar inspired by that talent for concision and make this bind as fancy as possible in a very small size.
I made two versions of this fic, the same typeset imposed as a mini and a lilliputian size (which I've gotten into because about 1.8cm in height fits the shelves of the book nook featured in the background of the pics). On a scrap print, I wasn't sure that the images in the typeset would print clearly at the smallest size so I imposed the mini as a backup and bound both when the second print with a different printer turned out great. And yes, you can read them!
I took a look at my stash and saw these scraps of gorgeous marbled paper I have been saving from a class I took in the fall and thought: I absolutely have to use this. The bookcloth corners are incredibly extra too and I love the way they look.
A Treatise on Breaking and Repairs by @glimmerglanger
this bind has been in development hell for some time, but I've decided it's met my proof of concept so here it is!
for this bind i used a lovely typeset by @finalfrontierpublishing .
this is a three piece in-boards bradel, with a leather spine. cover is inlaid with a second bookcloth, and the edges/cracks were painted red oxide acrylic, then water gilded with brass leaf for the kintsugi effect (I painted so many layers, it was damn near the whole real lacquer process). I didn't get a perfect finish, but I'm happy enough with it! edges are black ink with a single line of gold that matches the gold thread in the endband; the gold line is also the point where the story switches from "breaking" to "repairs" which is also shown by the art change in nic's typeset. some people might recognize this double core gradient endband from my binderary class this year, as i used it to teach the class.
so when i say this involved a lot of time, i mean I painted probably 10+ layers of acrylic over these bookcloth edges and sometimes sanded it back down to get a reasonably smooth raised surface for gilding (multiple layer of lacquer (and bole? maybe) are how actual kintsugi is done, though with much higher precision, and it's not usually a raised finish afaik).
and then applied brass leaf (i was at a friend's apt that day and did not have my bamboo tweezers so... bamboo chopsticks)
the leather spine involved some paring practice
and also figuring out that my first attempt to gild the leather section was going to tarnish, scraping all that back off, and going over it again with the acrylic first, then the leaf, then sealing it with dosabiki.
the gilding i did for this book is pretty cobbled together I think; i used the red acrylic to replace more authentic red bole, and then used an Italian water size to affix the brass leaf (water gilding style); and then finally pulled out the Japanese dosabiki to re-size the end result, which is common in japanese gilding to prevent tarnishing. the one part I might probably have screwed up is I'm not certain if I let the water size cure long enough before I applied the brass leaf; when I tried to burnish the leaf a little, it rubbed off instead. So somewhere in there I didn't give it enough time to dry.
A Treatise on Breaking and Repairs by @glimmerglanger
this bind has been in development hell for some time, but I've decided it's met my proof of concept so here it is!
for this bind i used a lovely typeset by @finalfrontierpublishing .
this is a three piece in-boards bradel, with a leather spine. cover is inlaid with a second bookcloth, and the edges/cracks were painted red oxide acrylic, then water gilded with brass leaf for the kintsugi effect (I painted so many layers, it was damn near the whole real lacquer process). I didn't get a perfect finish, but I'm happy enough with it! edges are black ink with a single line of gold that matches the gold thread in the endband; the gold line is also the point where the story switches from "breaking" to "repairs" which is also shown by the art change in nic's typeset. some people might recognize this double core gradient endband from my binderary class this year, as i used it to teach the class.
"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."
This is a reprise of the first glimmerglanger fic (and first star wars fic) I ever bound several years ago, as a gift for @mourningmountainsbindery. It was much earlier in my bookbinding journey, and you can tell! This time I had found some awesomely dramatic photo manips by @nobie which they allowed me to use for a dust jacket! I really enjoyed the effect from their addition.
I printed this on 28 lb linen finish paper which made it a very pleasing chonk. It also got silk endbands, crepaldi endpapers, a three color speckled edge, and colibri bookcloth with the title foiled in mando'a. Typeset is still my original version, but it got some better margins by virtue of printing it on legal quarto instead of letter quarto!
This is a Guardian zombie apocalypse AU! I'm using @helle-bored's typeset, which had a very neat stenciled/stamped aesthetic. The binding was loosely inspired by the Antarctic-published books that were bound in boards from wooden crates, but I went my own direction with the concept (in part because I wanted to practice sewing on cord with my sewing frame).
I had originally intended to give the wood a natural grayish weathered look (while I have lots of scrap wood in the basement, I didn't have anything suitable that had been sitting outside for years) but the iron acetate & tea combo that I treated the wood with had a much stronger effect than expected. I'm a fan of how it turned out though!
For the sewing, I referenced Exposed Spine Sewings by Keith Smith, this is a method that uses extra wraps around the cord to climb between signatures instead of a kettle stitch at the head and tail. The cords are laced through the boards and glued down; the furniture tacks are mostly for the aesthetic and only somewhat functional (I pre-drilled the holes they're hammered into because I was worried about the possibility of splitting the wood, so they're not in there as tight as they otherwise could be).
just wanted to say thank you for being so kind and always willing to share your knowledge and resources 🤗 makes things much less intimidating as a baby amateur binder! ❤️
oh wow, thank YOU so much for the appreciation!!
in my opinion, it's only fair to share, especially because I was only able to learn how to bind myself because of many other bookbinders freely sharing their knowledge and resources (<3 DAS and @renegadeguild).
i wish i was more up to the task of doing more videos and such some days, but alas. they are really not my thing. at least there are many people for whom it is their thing! and i am always happy to answer asks and dms or to talk to people in the Renegade discord.
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.
