the fact that the first book begins in the slave baths and the third ends there. the fact that we hear the bells in the opening scene of the books and in the final scene we hear them again. the fact that all of this started with damen killing laurent's brother, only for laurent to kill damen's brother in the very end. IT IS ALL ABOUT THE CYCLE OF HISTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The level of detail on the book addiction covers is insane! It even has the oranges Laurent likes to use as paperweights. I wonder if the red string on one of the papers is supposed to hint at Laurent already being in contact with Nikandros
And I love the emphasis on strategy here when most of the Prince's Gambit covers we have focus more on weapons and physical fighting. It fits the story so well!
My next completed project! This was something I had bound already, but it wasn't very pretty (it was one of my earliest bindings) and there were changes I wanted to make. So I present to you: my binding of @fahye's excellent Captive Prince short story collection!
This was a different kind of cover than I've previously done. This just has bookcloth over the spine, and then for the front cover I used cardstock with a toner-reactive foil to make the crown and laurel. Previously I've only been doing the bookcloth covers, both because it's a lot easier to make and because it's easier to design in some ways as well. But this one just came together like this, and I already had this deep blue paper, and it was just too good to pass up.
I wanted the picture on it to capture the feeling of the pictures used in the published editions of Captive Prince, but I also wanted to put my own spin on it. So it's a fancy crown with an olive branch inside of it, made to look like an old-timey etching.
More pics and rambling under the cut.
The title page, with the same design from the front (just smaller).
The endpapers, which are very pretty but also very thin. They were kind of a pain to work with and they went down pretty wrinkled-y but they're really pretty and you can't see it in the pictures but they are also very shiny and have ribbons of gold and silver ink running through them.
The title page. Avid readers might notice that I didn't include all of the short stories here, and added a few extra, and, well, I can do that because it's my binding! I wanted to have my favorite stories along with Run All the Lights and Dilation because those are also pretty short and I love those stories too.
On my bookshelf. One day it will be sitting next to the Polish editions which I WILL own before I die, I swear to god. I do kind of wish it was more obvious that this wasn't a rebinding of the original Captive Prince, which is kind of what it looks like from the cover, but it's just so fucking classy I couldn't bear to change anything about it.
Doing it the way I did--with the cloth binding and the paper cover--definitely meant a lot more measuring, and very precise measuring at that, which I'm never good at, but I think it turned out okay and everything looks mostly straight. And I'm getting better at making the textblock and the case and had less problems there than I normally do, which is awesome.
The gold on the bookcloth is my nemesis HTV. It went down about as well as it always does, which is to say not well (although, to be fair, the front cover was fine. It was the spine that gave me issues). At least there wasn't much of it this time, or anything too fiddly. The toner reactive foil, the stuff used on the crown/olive illustration--that stuff is awesome. I just printed it using my regular printer and then put the foil on and sent it through the laminator a few times. I don't think it would have been possible to get that effect with HTV, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
I made a little captive prince dustjacket for myself hehe ✨️
I was a little frustrated that I couldn't get the polish captive prince special editions 😔 (And the new US covers weren’t out yet, but I will definetly get those now!!)
So I went: 'Fine. I'll do it myself."
I don't know what got into me, but I started to add more and more to this and it ended up taking me 60 hrs 💀
Still not satisfied with everything (especially the font and frame) but it's ok, maybe I'll come back to that a little later ✨️
!Not everything is super accurate since it has been some time since I read the books and I (again 😭) didn't have them with me, while working on this!
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