It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
The next morning came. And a few more people signed up. I tentatively suggested that if anyone wanted to include a card or note and maybe some stickers for her wife and their kiddo L, it would be welcome. And people started asking me questions. Like, what fic does she like best? Where should we start? Can we make a care package? What does her wife need?
Knowing the people in the server, and their general kindness and enthusiasm, I should not have been surprised, I really shouldn't. It just hits differently when you're the one who's the recipient, you know? "I don't know why you're surprised," said another friend. "You asked us to help and we're helping!" And it wasn't an official guild project, just an incredible act of community and compassion. And immense enthusiasm and zero restraint.
I started asking some surreptitious questions of Zulu and Bell. I'd asked Zulu a few weeks before about granting blanket permission for anyone to bind her fic, and for the typesets to be shared. I casually said, "Sooo I mentioned this to the fanbinding group. If someone does want to send you something, can I share your address? And can I suggest they send cards/stickers to L?" (Yes, and yes.)
We started a separate thread in the Discord server to keep up with the planning. Some collaborations started to come up. I'll typeset from South Africa or southeast Asia or from next door in the next US state, you print and bind, we'll collect some of the American books for a mass mailing to Canada. I don't have time to bind, but I can contribute to shipping costs. I don't know that fandom, but I can take your typeset, and make a copy. I love that fandom but don't have time and materials, but I'll typeset if you bind. At this point, there were more than thirty people involved. New-old fandoms were discovered. Techniques and experiments grew.
I told Bell a little bit. She knew there were books coming. I didn't let her know the full scope, but I figured she could use something good to look forward to. Zulu said one of her goals was to finish all her WIPs before she died. (That hurt my heart. She almost made it! But even at the end, she got distracted by a new fic idea...)
The behind the scenes binding continued. There was negotiating over obscure fandoms, and exclamations over fic for niche favourites. A need for a great deal of baseball theming because Zulu wrote a LOT of ALOTO fic in the last few years. There were anthologies and pamphlets, and tiny books, and large chonks, and an entire collection of every drabble Zulu ever wrote in House fandom.
There was a 100-word hockey RPF drabble bound in a one-page folio with metallic foil details. There was a whole-fandom slipcased pamphlet set of her handful of Friday Night Lights fic. There were Buffy and X-Files fic unearthed from deep in her backlist. There were several bonkers-ambitious binds of her SMAUs, social media AUs of tweets and screenshots that had me throw up my hands and exclaim "how am I supposed to typeset this?"
There were obscure Canadian fandoms encased in the fanciest of marbled paper pamphlets, and a House fic about stolen lunches bound in a brown paper bag. A flower-titled ALOTO fic with a cover patterned like a seed packet. A Yuletide obscure movie fic in silk moire. Firefly fic with a marbled paper inset, and a Stargate Atlantis fic with a vellum dustcover. A crackfic five things fic with a metallic paper DVD on the cover as a Chinese stab binding, from a fandom that needed MOAR LENS FLARE. ("I am sure you know this, Luna," said the binder working on it, "but Zulu is really fucking funny." Yes, yes she absolutely was.)
I can't name every single book because there were more than FORTY of them, but I love every one of them and the care that went into them.
I told you Renegade goes hard.
We drove to nearby city to see Zulu and Bell in August, 2024. They'd just changed up her pain medication and she was having a good day. We had a good visit. I put the pamphlet fic in her hands myself. They'd told her in June that she should expect about a year at most. It would only be three months. That was the last time I saw her in person.
We moved up the projected mailing date from mid-October to mid-September.
We knew, over the September long weekend, when the group chat went quiet, that it wasn't a good sign. I'd kept up a steady stream of pet pictures and other small bits of news. As the summer ended, we had fewer responses from her, and were more likely to just get an emoji back. Morning glory flowers only bloom for a day, and they were blooming outside my back door. I started sending a picture of that morning's flowers to the group chat each day. (And cat pictures. Of course.) I don't know if anyone but me really cared about the morning glories, but it felt like something tangible to hold onto.
The first few envelopes and boxes started to arrive. There were cards and stickers and handknit slippers, and a science facts zine just for L. I told Bell, tell Zulu we love her. And that I'm not sorry I unleashed 30+ fanbinders on her AO3 account.
Bell: (lists off the books that had arrived.)
Me: Oh, so the group shipment from California isn't there yet. Plus at least three other packages I know about.
Bell: Holy shites
Several lovely people found my name in the acknowledgements of more than one fic, and sent me copies, too. (Twenty years in fandom together…) I cried.
We knew things weren't good when Bell emailed to set up a time for a video chat. A few days after the September long weekend, we talked to them face to face, to get the news that they were moving Zulu into hospice care the next day. It would be the last time we'd hear her voice. We knew it was coming, it just all went so much more quickly than expected. She died less than three weeks later.
(But take a look at the dates on the last fic on her AO3 account. In such typical fandom fashion, she was updating her last fic from her hospice bed. A direct quote from Zulu: "The most important thing once I'm there, of course, will be to sort out the wifi situation.")
So, timelines got bumped up by another week. There was a rush for mailing. One international package from Europe got returned to sender without leaving the country due to post office shenanigans, and had to make a return trip, too late for Zulu. The package from Japan made it. The big group shipment box was sent via overnight delivery. It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It showed up on Friday, the day that she died, after she was gone. But by that last week, I'm not sure how much Zulu would have taken in about it, honestly. Bell took it with her to supper that night with friends and family to open as a special treat.
There were more than forty books of all sizes all told, from more than thirty people, and I still have about four more in progress myself right now, though I'll never get to put them in Zulu's hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS…"
But we flooded her with books of her own fic. We deluged her family with her words and love.
The books were on display at her memorial service, along with the quilt that her ALOTO friends had made for her. Also, the jersey she got printed based on her own fic (such a dork, I say with the world's most affection.) The books were all over the front of the room, and it wasn't even all of them. Zulu's mom sent a heartfelt thank you card to be shared with the whole group. The memorial also included earl grey tea and shrimp (two of Zulu's favourites) and a video message recorded to her from one of the actors from A League of Their Own (which I am sure confused many people, but we knew what was up!)
The second group shipment arrived with me several months later, and at least one more book came to me in person at the Renegade retreat, and Bell has them all in a bookcase together. I still have a few more to finish right now.
And, Renegade being Renegade, a couple of people have eyed Zulu's AO3 account and said, "Well, we didn't manage to bind ALL her 350 fic… so far…" And I laughed until I cried, and I am still hugging you all right now Renegade, SO HARD. And you've left a legacy, and you've made a difference. There are no thank you's that are enough. The love is stored in the fanbinds.
I've asked anyone who wants to share what they made to tag it #fanbindsforzulu. If you want to see some amazing things, check out the tag. And if you want to read her fic, and if you want to bind it, she would have loved that, and I would love to see it, too. And tell your friends you love them.
It was a huge honor to be part of this project. For my part, I typeset and bound Pleiades, a Big Eden fic that made me cry just as much as the film.
I also bound Red Stitch Books' typeset (all the way from South Africa!) for Gators Verse (A League Of Their Own).
While I'm so sorry that Zulu isn't here to see them, I'm glad that her works are preserved for her family and friends. It was amazing being part of such a massive project, with so much collaboration and sharing of ideas, typesets, and love.
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.
Deeply honoured to have my very own copy of one of the coolest pieces of fan work I've ever encountered: a tiny book version of the "Mass Hysteria" exhibit from The Mistholme Museum!
It passed the sniff test with Frog, by the way.
Deeply grateful to @fantailpress for this incredible gift, which has been on quite a journey across the world to make it here. I'm constantly in awe of the things people make, and honoured that they chose my work as their inspiration!
I did a thing! A very small, wee thing. This is my favorite audio segment of literally anything ever, and I am thrilled that I got a chance to make it for its creator!
@daemonluna gifted me a hard copy of my Mass Hysteria typeset last year, so this is actually the only copy I have personally made.
This book is about 1.75"/4.5cm tall. First time rounding corners and doing a leather pseudo half-bind. Title is hot stamped in four colors to mimic the glitching theme.
The tiniest headcaps and headbands!
Cover paper and endpapers marbled by @aetherseer
The typeset emphasizes the glitchiness throughout this segment of the episode. For the three stories, I color coded them in red, blue, and green, but there's a lot of overlapping between them to emulate the actual audio. I added a little more chaos to this specific typeset, compared to the one I submitted for the Tiny Books Bang.
Dom, thank you for creating a wonderful and entertaining podcast. I'm very glad this is now in your hands!
Wild Creatures and Home Sweet Home by NebulusCharlie (MDZS)
I had the honor of binding two MDZS fics for @nebuluscharlie!
First up is Wild Creatures, a modern vampire AU. I did a three piece bradel for these guys to emphasize the black-and-red theme. It didn't photograph well but I used World Cloth red neon slub and that is one sexy bookcloth. I also used World Cloth black shantung for the spines.
The gold and silver HTV really popped on the spines.
Black and gold marbled momi for the endpapers.
Lots of red text! It was fun doing a modern design.
Next up is Home Sweet Home, a domestic home renovation AU! I did an overlay design with chiyogami paper in the inset, representing a window looking out onto the cherry blossom tree in their yard. Bookcloth is Dubletta blue.
To complement the pink cherry blossoms, I did pink cloth-wrapped endbands.
The endpapers are the same chiyogami cherry blossom pattern as in the cover, but in blue!
The window/cherry blossom theme continues in the typeset.
Thank you for the opportunity to make these for you, Charlie! <3
This past summer, I participated in the @renegadeguild Tiny Book Bang! This tiny book was created from a typeset (digital formatted file) made by another guild member, @fantailpress. It's fanbinding but not ficbinding in this case, since it's an excerpt of a podcast script.
The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality is a series of stories told in the format of a museum audio guide, so I staged my photos in a rough approximation of a museum exhibit. (Canadian quarter for scale.)
This particular episode segment is a Pied Piper story, told in overlapping, layered voices, and the typesetting reflects that in a very cool way. I've tried to echo the inside text with the static-style paint on the cover.
One of the nice things about tiny books is that you can use all sorts of scraps of material. Commercial book cloth, title and images stencilled with acrylic paint (I used a site to generate colouring book pages to turn the pied piper image into an outline to stencil), and endpapers are from a scrap pack a friend sent me, picked because they remind me of something you'd see in a kids' fairy tale collection.
Also, I got the sneaky glee of making something for a friend who didn't know I'd picked her typeset. (She was only the one who recommended the podcast to me, after all!)
If I had a penny for every time @gargoyleandgremlinpress made me a sekrit project... I'd actually have quite a few pennies. :D
The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality by @dom-guilfoyle is a podcast about a very strange museum, told through a friendly and surprisingly sentient audio tour guide. The first season is fairly episodic as the audio tour guide describes various museum exhibits, but throughout Season 2, an underlying story arc develops as the audio tour guide begins to experience... difficulties.
This particular segment, which deals with three related (same??) stories on mass hysteria, remains the best use of an audio media that I've ever listened to. Seriously, go listen to it. You don't even need much more context for this segment than what I've already given (though obviously you should listen to the whole thing. This is my secret plan to lure you in.).
As I listened to it the third or fourth time, I was already starting to picture how it would look in visual form. I've also been wanting to stretch my LaTeX wings and do a House of Leaves-esque typeset, and this was the perfect subject for it! But since this segment was very short, the book would need to be teeny tiny. Perfect for the Renegade Tiny Books Bang!
I leaned into the glitchiness of both the audio tour guide at this point, as well as the inherent glitchiness in the story. The illustrations are all by Kate Greenaway from an illustrated 19th century edition of The Pied Piper.
One big challenge was trying to get the three stories to be distinct yet overlapping. After waffling about fonts and font style, I settled on some good ol' RGB (CMY would have been more appropriate for glitching, but yellow would not have been a good text color!). I tried to mimic the audio glitches and aberrations as much as I could.
I had a ton of fun playing with the spacing, though if I could redo it I would go even more chaotic :D
AND THEN. Luna had to go and surprise me by picking up my typeset for the exchange and not telling me about it. (!!!)
This tiny little guy and its tiny little placard now sit in my tiny little library, which is fortunately not the museum itself because as we all know, the written word can be very dangerous indeed.
Thank you, Luna, for making such a perfect tiny little book, and for doing a SEKRIT PROJECT for the millionth time :D
This is my first book series, and what a way to start! Heaven Official's Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu is an epic Chinese novel spanning 2000 years and, in my case, 2276 pages. Made up of five arcs, I ended up making six books since the third arc was massive.
I wanted the books to look uniform at first glance but also capture the color and joy that the series has brought me. These are all three piece bradel, with gray silk moire on the spine and a bunch of colorful silk moires for the covers. The hanzi is all inset with the rest of the cover layered over the top (swiftly becoming my preferred cover design technique). All writing and illustrations were done via foil quill on my Cricut.
I also marbled coordinating endpapers for each of the books.
TGCF is full of motifs and I crammed as many in as I could. The red string is continuous across all title pages (I also used red thread for sewing).
I did custom borders and chapter headers for the present (Arcs 1, 3, and 5), past (Arc 2), and distant past (Arc 4).
The above graphics, in addition to custom text dividers meant I got a crash course in creating Inkscape vectors, which was stressful but ultimately fun and VERY useful for future projects.
(not shown - the literal two months of me designing, deleting, redesigning, deleting, etc. the vine motif. Two. solid. months.)
Keeping the textblocks and covers the exact same size was a whole challenge and a half and not something I usually worry about, but I have learned so much while making these!
See below for my geeking out over Chinese art history (includes very mild spoilers for TGCF).
I really wanted to emphasize the grand scale of time in the story. There's the present day, with flashbacks to 800 years prior, and history going back a further 1200 years. A lot can change over 2000 years and I wanted to show that passage of time.
My inspiration started when I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. One of the exhibits was on the city of Anyang from the Shang Dynasty (1250 BCE - 1050 BCE). I was immediately struck by the complexity and geometric rigidness of art from over 3000 years ago, like in this bronze wine vessel. Also they had the cutest dragons.
The more I learned about the Shang Dynasty, the more fascinated I became by the art style and the period in general (oracle bones!). A lot of "fantasy ancient China" tends to use steel swords and I wanted Xie Lian to feel like he was coming from the Bronze Age, which would add to his fascination and geekery over Hua Cheng's weapons collection. I also thought some of those motifs from the above wine vessel would make for fantastic chapter headers!
Eventually I settled on Xie Lian coming from the Han period (202 BCE - 220 CE), which would have been at the beginning of the Iron Age but would also put Wuyong around the time of the Shang Dynasty and still allow Fang Xin to be a bronze sword (I know the description is steel, shh, and yes, I did base the design of the text divider on a bronze sword but with a Han-era hilt). I set the present day right around the time of the Tang Dynasty (618 CE - 907 CE). And now it was time to find auspicious motifs!
Arcs 1, 3, and 5 has a Tang vine motif which I based on this box.
Arc 2 has a Han ocean waves motif, based on this bronze mirror.
In homage to my fascination by the Shang art style, and as a nod to the influence of a certain Prince of Wuyong, Arc 4 has a Shang cloud and thunder motif, based on the very wine vessel I saw at the Smithsonian.
I also changed the hanzi on the title pages and covers depending on the period. Arcs 1, 3, and 5 use a Tang period script. Arc 2 has a clerical script, which would have been more commonly used in the Han period, and Arc 4 has the closest thing I could get to oracle bone script - small seal script.
For the cover design, I mimicked the above bronze mirror, which were popular in the Han period and often highly decorated on the backside. This particular style, also called the TLV mirror, is thought to have cosmological representations with a square world surrounded by the waves of the cosmic ocean. Although my design is not historically accurate, I did try to mimic the "world" of TGCF, surrounded by the cosmos of the historical periods, with the vine leaves standing in for the eight pips commonly placed around the world.
(Bonus in-progress pics: this is the most math I've had to do for any book)
Ask An Exec by @shinyopals takes on all five seasons of The Magnus Archives from the point of view of an innocent definitely-not-Ask-A-Manager career advice blogger, who starts getting some interesting queries from a certain archivist...
The entire story is told through blog posts, featuring Jon's terrible anonymized situations, Abigail's attempts at providing genuine advice while also going "WTF?", and many commenters who are also saying WTF while also encouraging Jon to unionize. Shinyopals is masterful at pulling out the true horror in TMA: poor corporate management. It's hilarious but also heart-twisting as the seasons progress, and somehow, somehow, you start caring about not only Jon's situation from a more personal point of view, but also various OC commenters and their attempts at trying to help Jon without having a clue about what's actually happening.
Because this fic is very heavily based on Ask A Manager, I leaned into a self-help tradpub design.
The interior design is not so tradpub-y, but leans into the sterile graphic design of many advice blogs. :D
As mentioned, the fic is formatted like a series of blog posts, which the author did an amazing job of emulating on AO3 (seriously, check it out! A true feat in wrangling code!). It was interesting seeing how much of the comment threads I could preserve while flipping pages, but hopefully it worked out! The fonts, colors, and general design were specifically chosen to mimic the current version of the Ask A Manager blog.
(TMA SPOILER) There's a certain shift change for the epilogue, so I took cues from the author's AO3 coding and changed the design accordingly!
This took almost a year of leveling up in LaTeX to typeset it efficiently; thank you @shinyopals for your patience in receiving this! I hope you enjoy your copy, and seriously everyone, even if you're not in Magnus Archives at all, please read this fic. It's WONDERFUL.
A bit of a video showcase for the gorgeous, gorgeous binding of Written by the Victors!!! @daemonluna typeset it and @rhipidurafan made this copy for me!! Things to notice--the absolutely gorgeous endpapers! The dyed blue edges! The different fonts--type for bibliography, and then, even more excitingly, later, different fonts for the poetry, the songs, the early and late Atlantian dialects segments. Absolutely beautiful. This sort of hand-made art just floors me; it's everything wonderful about fandom IMO!
When I started bookbinding, Written By the Victors by Speranza was VERY high on the list of fics I knew I would read over and over again. Unreliable narration is one of my most favorite tropes and this love letter to academia took it and RAN with it.
@daemonluna made a fantastic typeset for it (all that Atlantean!!) and I'm happy to have now made copies for Speranza, a friend, and myself!
All books were bound with Colibri bookcloth with foiled titling and decorations. The stars on the stargate came out... variable, but let's just say it adds to the charm!
The three books also had variations in edge decoration, headbands, and endpapers, though they're thematically similar.
It took a while for me to make these but I got there in the end! Thank you, Luna, for creating this beautiful typeset, and thank you, Speranza, for writing one of the best fics in fandom history, in my terribly biased opinion. :D
Written By The Victors! Let me continue this post unwinding back to the beginning of the process with the typeset.
When I got my assignment for the 2022 @renegadepublishing exchange this typeset came out of, I was a) filled with a certain amount of glee at being assigned @fantailpress (Project for friend! Sekrit Project!) and b) thought that the AO3 URL must be wrong. Because the number that it ended in was "15." As it turns out... it was because that link was, of course, Written By The Victors, and was presumably the fifteenth fic uploaded to AO3.
I knew I wanted to typeset this fic. Eventually. Probably when I had more practice. There are a LOT of different formats and document types. As described on fanlore, "The secession of Atlantis from Earth and its reformation as a city state is told through thirty-six unreliable narrators, in a mix of excerpts from academic books, interviews, poetry and so on, and a connecting straight narrative."
Which is to say, there's a lot going on in the text, stylistically speaking. But... @fantailpress and I had talked about the challenges of typesetting this fic! I knew she wanted to bind it! I also have loved it since it was first posted, and have fond memories of my dear IRL fandom friend @zulufic making a fanvid for it, possibly while sitting on our living room couch.
So. I decided I was going to just do it. No pressure… the final total of things was eight custom styles, eighteen fonts, and more than eighty chapters. Absolutely worth it to see the gorgeous object it's been turned into!
I didn't use a different font for every narrator, but did have one style for the body text, another for the academic articles, a third for the transcripts, and a series of different handwriting fonts for the various journals, letters, and diaries.
The title font, Fake Serif, was chosen for a handwritten feel to be very literally written by the victors. The main narrative is my favourite body font, Cochineal. The opening list of titles is Courier New, old-school, as if it's a draft of a typed citation list, probably photocopied, as well as the quoted statements to mimic the draft of a transcript.
The biography excerpts are Georgia. For a reference book vibe, but a little bit more flair than Times New Roman. The quoted texts are Baskerville Old Face, spacing reduced to match a more formal academic work, and Garamond (City of Spires: A Memoir) to represent a more commercial book, matching its tone of a tell-all pop culture biography.
Fun fact... for the main narrative, I found a gate-symbol font, and the scene breaks spell out "home."
And here's a rapid jump back and forth between narrative and written accounts, one of the challenges in laying it out on the page.
The last segment of the fic, with the historical documents, was a lot of fun to play with. The fonts were more ornate for poetry excerpts, and I tried to mimic an increasingly archaic style with each chapter to match the content, without sacrificing too much legibility.
And of course, at the very end, there's a bibliography.
So, big thanks to @cesperanza for allowing her work to be included in the exchange event--and for writing an intricately constructed hell of a story that still occupies our brains years later. And @fantailpress, your construction, cases, and binding details are always stunning, and I adore what you did with this one! Fandom, gotta love it.
Reblogging again for @daemonluna's typesetting notes :D Such a wonderfuly typeset to bind! And I still can't believe I was chatting with you about this very fic while you were SEKRITLY WORKING ON IT FOR ME.
A bit of a video showcase for the gorgeous, gorgeous binding of Written by the Victors!!! @daemonluna typeset it and @rhipidurafan made this copy for me!! Things to notice--the absolutely gorgeous endpapers! The dyed blue edges! The different fonts--type for bibliography, and then, even more excitingly, later, different fonts for the poetry, the songs, the early and late Atlantian dialects segments. Absolutely beautiful. This sort of hand-made art just floors me; it's everything wonderful about fandom IMO!
When I started bookbinding, Written By the Victors by Speranza was VERY high on the list of fics I knew I would read over and over again. Unreliable narration is one of my most favorite tropes and this love letter to academia took it and RAN with it.
@daemonluna made a fantastic typeset for it (all that Atlantean!!) and I'm happy to have now made copies for Speranza, a friend, and myself!
All books were bound with Colibri bookcloth with foiled titling and decorations. The stars on the stargate came out... variable, but let's just say it adds to the charm!
The three books also had variations in edge decoration, headbands, and endpapers, though they're thematically similar.
It took a while for me to make these but I got there in the end! Thank you, Luna, for creating this beautiful typeset, and thank you, Speranza, for writing one of the best fics in fandom history, in my terribly biased opinion. :D
My hot wife has arranged for us to have my Noir AU (both installments) bound by the awesomely talented @fantailpress and it's SO BEAUTIFUL!!! 😭😭😭😍🥰🤩 This type of binding is called "tête-bêche" or "head to foot" and I love it so much!
I'm very, very excited to show this off! Pearls For a Funeral and Bullets For a Wedding are a wonderful noir AU by @jadedbirch, featuring Wei Wuxian as a detective and Lan Wangji as the Chanel-bedecked femme fatale. I've done mostly historical fics so it was excited to work on something more "modern" (well... within the last 100 years).
The joy of doing two stories is that you can do some fun structures like tête-bêche. You read one story as usual and then you can flip the book over and the read the other story! This also presents opportunities to do complementary and integrated designs.
San Francisco is basically its own character in these fics, so I did a flippable skyline for the cover. I used Hikari Nashiji and silk moire bookcloth as a nod to Lan Wangji's taste in clothes.
As usual, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji's colors don't always mesh well together, but it's VERY easy to have complementary designs for each story.
Thank you, @jadedbirch and @zoi-no-miko, for the oppportunity to make this for you! <3
Alone At Christmas? by @captain-apostrophe is a modern AU where A-Qing hires Xue Yang to freak out her family, but then it turns out her dads are super hot...
Fast forward a few months and I got the brilliant(?) idea to do a decorative stab binding, which is (originally) a traditional Asian bookbinding technique. There are many beautiful variations on it, so I figured, as I do, why not make it dicks? Why not make it three dicks? And what better story to do it with?
(yes, technically there are six dicks, but there are two stories so it's really three dicks per fic)
In combination with this ridiculous design, I decided to embrace both the Christmas theme and Xue Yang's trashiness and use Duo Pepperoni for the bookcloth, and some very, very interesting marbled endpapers we've nicknamed salami sandwich.
The typeset was lovingly made for me by @three--rings in the 2023 typesetting exchange. She preserved the ridiculousness as well as all of the author's hilarious Santa photos (which, WOW, that is a whole thing!).
I'm very happy to have this in my possession! Thank you @three--rings for the typeset, and thank you @captain-apostrophe for making me laugh for a good couple weeks after reading this. :D
I had the privilege of typesetting and binding The Scarlet Lotus by @rainbowtitania, a MDZS fic where Wei Wuxian is saving Wens while disguised as the Yiling Patriarch, only to be forced to keep his identity a secret from his arranged marriage to Lan Wangji...
This was a LOT of fun because it's a take on The Scarlet Pimpernel, and I grew up enjoying the Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour film. The original novel, written by Baroness Orczy in 1905, is considered the first "superhero" novel, in the sense that it features an alternate, heroic identity that must be kept secret.
The cover design features a fancypants title with the scarlet lotus motif and a border of lotus leaves. I used a grey moire bookcloth to mimic the robes CQL!WWX wears. In general, the color scheme was gray and scarlet rather than black and scarlet.
The title page is a running title featuring the actual fic summary, in an homage to novels from (approximately) the period of The Scarlet Pimpernel...
...but the cover design is echoed in the half title and chapter pages.
This was a ton of fun to work on! Thank you, rainbow, for writing a hilarious, sweet, and very nostalgic fic!
A gift for @ficcinghell! This Check Please fic was written AND typeset by @tiesthatbindery and features the frogs on the Appalachian Trail. I continue to love doing layered covers and mimicked the section of the AT that the boys hiked (Katahdin to around Allenstown).
The original typeset was for folio size, but I wanted it to feel a bit like a pocket book you would have gotten in the 70s so I shrunk it down to legal quarto. My original plan was to paint the edges in bronze but the bronze paint failed miserably, so I trimmed it off and painted with green ink instead, which further contributes to that retro novel vibe.
I used Lokta paper with a fern pattern for the endpapers as well as the underlayer in the cover.
Denois' typeset was understandably perfect already, and I am very grateful I got to use it! The immaculate retro vibes are wonderful.
Two last books before the end of the year! Author copies for the glorious, ridiculous, and immensely fun How To Fall In Love With A Catfish: A Guide By Wei Wuxian (Disaster Rat) by @bitterbeetle and Yuisaki, wherein Wei Wuxian makes a new friend on Tinder who claims he's Lan Wangji (sus). This was the first MDZS fic I read once I had a faint clue who at least Wei Wuxian was, and I was so happy to make these for the author (and for a friend!).
Much as I love WWX/LWJ, they do NOT have great matching colors so it makes it difficult to incorporate into a single good-looking color scheme. But! With two author copies to make, I didn't have to choose!
It was really fun making complementary books. I forgot to get shots of the endbands but they were also gold and silver, respectively.
The typeset was incredibly fun to work with. There are a ton of Tinder chats, which I incorporated into the title page.
There are also some other phone chats (modeled off of Samsung texts), Twitter, and Google search results, to add to my social media coding repetoire.
Huge thanks to the authors for writing such a hilarious fic and being part of my introduction to MDZS fics! <3
If you asked me last year, after having bound a MDZS fic without knowing anything about the show/books, whether I would go ride or die for the fated main pairing with decades of pining, or a poly trio featuring a sadistic mass murderer and the two people he tortured the most, well... you can guess what I would have answered. But within a week after finishing CQL, I blithely ignored all the WWX/LWJ fic recs people had lovingly curated for me and instead read every single Yi City trio I could possibly find.
While there are many, MANY righteous sandwich fics near and dear to my heart, the one I keep coming back to is If Living Can Be This by @veliseraptor. She took those glimpses at what Xue Yang could have been and shifted the story just a little to the left and looked at how the Yi City arc could have gone in a very, very different direction, and all without "redeeming" Xue Yang or ignoring how dangerous he was and still is.
So when I got wind that @misanthropiczombie had requested it for this year's Renegade Exchange, I engineered my way into being her giftee (ie, begged the mods).
This is a chonker of a series; while the main story is around 74k words, with the sequels it was about 180k, which translated to 572 pages! Originally I was going to do a typical rounded andbacked cased-in binding, but then a fellow Renegadee mentioned springback designs, which have a "spring" mechanism that forces the book to lay very flat when open. For such a big book that is unlikely to be read while lying down in bed (I mean, do what you want but I am not responsible for broken noses), this seemed like a GREAT time to learn an entirely new binding technique in less than a month. :D But as you can see, it lays VERY flat.
This is also the most complex cover design I've done so far - I used a vine motif for the typeset and wanted to emulate that in the cover, so after consulting with @celestial-sphere-press on her river bind cover, I cut out pieces of cover board for a moderately difficult onlay design.
I went with black and gold as the overall theme and also did some suminagashi for the edges to match the marbled endpapers and because It's What Xue Yang Deserves. At the same time, the book cloth is very nubby and textured to reflect the austere life they're living in Yi City at that point.
Because there clearly wasn't enough gold in this book, I added a fibrous gold flysheet to partly obscure the title page.
In one of the additional stories, Song Lan compares Xue Yang to a strangling vine that is aware that it could be ripped out at any moment. I used that as inspiration for the title and chapter ornaments. The text dividers are Jiangzai's hilt from CQL.
While the springback design was looooong, I did enjoy making it and may even do it again for mine and/or the author's copy! Or maybe I will cop out and just do rounded and backed cased in, we shall see. :D
Many, many thanks to the Renegade crew for supporting me during this bind. This one truly took a village and I would not have been able to do it without them!
During last year's Renegade Exchange, I made And So My Heart Beats Wildly, a MDZS Modern AU fic by @omgkatsudonplease (post here). Almost a year later, I finally finally made the author copy!
Lily requested Lan colors and I had a hilariously hard time trying to find just the right shades of blue and white, that would also complement . Inspiration finally struck when I got my hands on some very fancy Cave Paper that had the right shades of blue and mimicked the abstract design I used for the typeset.
I backed a very thin, translucent cloud-patterned Tarasen paper to light blue cardstock for that extra Lan touch (thanks to @misanthropiczombie for reccing the paper!).
One year on I'm still really proud of this typeset - the social media coding was a labor of love and I'm still using what I've learned in various other typesets to this day.
Thank you again to @omgkatsudonplease for writing a glorious fic and giving me the opportunity to send this to you! <3
I finished this one a while back BUT after some tumblr hiatus and a computer breakdown issue I AM BACK BABYYYYY. Here's the author copy for Play It Again by Metisket. I made the first version about a year ago and it's been fun to see the improvements I've made in construction since then.
I did splattered edges for the first time, and also used hand-dyed variegated thread for both the headbands and the textblock sewing.
I also am far better at trimming textblocks now, so the edges are a lot cleaner now. :D
