I'm not sure if I've posted about it before, but over the last couple weeks, I've been chipping away at a little passion project:
I've bound Different Department!
Different Department: Percy from Accounting is a Jercy fic I wrote last year / early this year, initially a oneshot for @jercy-events' Jercy Solstice, later expanded to 7 chapters.
Without further ado, here's the result:
I sewed the text block incl. end cards, glued a cotton herringbone tape over the spine, and then glued the case to the text. The case is made from 4mm chipboard (plus a cutoff from a pizza carton for the spine), wrapped in 95% cotton, 5% elastane burgundy stretch denim. I would have preferred davey board and non-stretch denim, but I couldn't find any locally.
For the end cards, I got this lovely rainbow print card stock (the end of the book continues into green and blue). I liked the idea to get a purple-to-orange gradient in the front to represent Jason and Percy, and the green and blue in the back as a nod to the gay men's flag designs that have spread over the last decade.
Here's the dedication, as on the fic – shoutout to @owlintheskies, who ran the initial event, and @chubbybunny25, who cheered me on and discussed the text with me! Gracias!
And because printing and binding a book makes it feel a lot more "real" than just a webpage somewhere, I wanted to go all out: I made proper graphics for the text messages and emails (above), took care of a proper (as well as I could – I've since improved markedly!) layout with first lines indented, closer paragraph spacing, and put headers and footers with chapter names and page numbers.
But the biggest improvement: illustrations!
And can I say, thank god for stock photo websites, because I can't draw to save my life. There's nine illustrations in the book, all photobashed together from stock. One of my favourite examples is below:
And because I made them so by god I'm gonna show them off, here's some others:
Doesn't that just look delicious? There's tons more, but I'm not gonna cram all nine of them in this here post.
Now, what have I learned? Because there were plenty of oopsies.
Get an upholstery needle. Really. It makes it so much easier to sew the text block; you have to dip in between the pages and back out and a curved needle is a game changer.
Layer signatures. For this one, I overlooked the "group signatures" option in the imposition software (pdfimpose.it, for the record), so each thread only went through one piece of paper. It worked, but more than a few holes ended up tearing open – at least two layers next time!
Get more glue. I blew nearly an entire bottle of PVA wood glue on this and by the end of it, I was squeezing droplets out. Big bottle next time.
Sewing the end cards into the text block was 100% the right decision. Many tutorials said to only glue them, a few said to sew them; I'm very happy I sewed them. Much more stable IMO.
Next time I bind a book, I'm gonna borrow one of those guillotine-style paper cutters. The edges of my text block are quite uneven, enough to make thumbing through quite hard, and they didn't have to be.
Thinner board for the cover. The chipboard I used is 4mm and it's bordering on unusable; next time I should go for 2mm instead.
The spine cover does not need 25% ease. I made the thinner cardstock piece for the spine way too large, thinking of the thick chipboard, and as a result, the spine of the case does not lay flat and curves outwards way more than necessary.
But, at the end of the day, I made a book and it opens and can be read!
P.S: The text messages were made using ifaketextmessage.com, with some edits from me (i.e. the timestamps, making them wider to accomodate the book page, and some custom graphics such as this missed call icon:
