Mythril Thread Books & Amber Family Manufacture

Ril, they/them. Mythril Thread Books is a member of Renegade Bookbinding Guild. Amber Family Manufacture is for projects done by my spouse (who is not a part of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild) and me. I firmly believe in the gift economy of fandom, and thus do not sell and never plan on selling my books. I’m also not accepting ficbinding commissions. Find my handbound notebooks here.

[mythrilthread]

mithridatism by @swordsmans

I’ve wanted to bind this amazing fic for a while now, and here’s the result of my pondering.

🌳 I always want to bind Zoro-centric fics in green (it being my favorite color also doesn’t hurt), so the cover features a mosaic of 6 different leather types (So Much Paring) + 1 textured paper, faux bands on the spine, and my first ever attempt at leather tooling! I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy using wheels (they are used to make long stripes) as much as I did, and to enjoy using letters as little as I did (so fiddly!).

🍃 Leather-hinged endpapers with some lovely decorative paper by Clairefontaine.

🌿 Textured edges and embroidered endbands.

🐍 Printed on 120 gsm lightly textured paper that kicked my printer’s ass, but we persevered.

🌾 My true pride and joy here is the typeset, featuring a fantastic snake life cycle drawing by Zoe Keller, and something like 40 public domain botanical illustrations (used as fancy scene breaks) of plants mentioned in a known recipe of mithridate (with the one exception of Asian rice on the last page for plot reasons).

I had so much fun with this project, and it was well worth the three weeks of hard work.

[mythrilthread]

This is a restoration/rebinding of a childhood favorite. This book is the same age as I, and it fucking Shows.

Here’s the before:

The textblock was holding on a last layer of tape, which was used by at least two different people to hold the book together. One endpaper was torn in half. More than a dozen pages had tears of various sizes, the first and last signatures were pretty much loose leafs.

So I decided to restore the textblock as much as I can and remake the cover from scratch.

Here’s what I did:

- painstakingly removed all the tape; - cut the textblock from the cover and cut the first and last signatures from the textblock; - removed the old stinky glue from the spine on the book; - fixed the torn pages using Japanese tissue paper; - reassembled first and last signatures, sewn them to the textblock, glued the spine, adding bookbinding mule and spine stiffener, sewn French double core endbands; - scanned and retouched the endpapers, removing the tears, then printed them and glued them into place; - sanded the edges of the textblock a bit (the original didn’t have enough margins to guillotine them), rounded the spine, made an Oxford hollow; - made the new Bradel-style cover, using gorgeous green goat leather, and foiled my interpretation of the original cover art (I didn’t feel like doing all the small letters on the publisher’s name) with a foil quill.

I learned SO much during the making of this, and I’m so so so happy with how this turned out.

[mythrilthread]

A Coat of Paint by @songbvrd

I’ve had this typeset (by the wonderful @aetherseer) printed and sewn since Binderary 2023, and Finally came up with the design idea I liked just this month. I used the colors of the Munsons’ trailer and paint as my main theme.

🎨 This is a backed book, with laced-on boards and four faux cords, covered with leather and hand-painted bookcloth.

🎨 The edges are painted to match the color of the bookcloth. The endbands are sewn in shades of teal and green.

🎨 The leather-hinged endpapers are a combination of handmade recycled paper and scrapbooking paper.

[mythrilthread]

in quiet, a favor by Helenish

A lovely Teen Wolf story in its A6 laced-on board binding form.

🐾 The whole design came together when I decided to use wolf tracks for scene dividers, and found a nice pointillist image. Pointillism feels like a great visual synonym for “quiet”, so I went for dots and half-tones.

🐾 The leather I used for cover and endbands is called pasta española, Spanish paste, which is a special way of curing/dyeing the leather. The paper on the cover is handmade recycled paper.

🐾 The endpaper was marbled by me. This spindly trembly effect was a happy accident, and I feel it fits the vibe I was going for perfectly.

🐾 Also, this was my first time backing a book. Fun! (Though I’m not a big fan of the way these books open.)

[mythrilthread]

like the pelt of some prey by @hauntedfalcon

This bind of an absolutely outstanding fic is a very experimental project made as a gift for @fantailpress.

🍃 It’s an A6 coptic binding (with coptic endbands!) using a variety of new techniques I learned during my first semester of studies as an artisan bookbinder. Check out those textured edges, for example!

🌳 The covers are made with textured paper I painted to look like tree bark, leaves preserved in glycerin on the front cover and a piece of fleece (cured by my classmate and dyed by me to look a bit like fox pelt) on the back cover.

🍁 I chose those endpapers to look a bit like green and blue kilim featured in the story.

🦊 Typesetting was done with two goals in mind: make the most out of 9200-word story in an A6 format AND using things I learned from reading Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book for evil purposes. So in this book you have the perfectly proportioned margins (HUGE) and a lovely classical layout for the title page (with illustration drawn by me). The rest of my typesetting choices would most likely get me cursed by Tschichold. I used a “desert-inspired” Arida for my body font and overpainted the italicized sections with a very diluted mixture of green ink and metallic acrylics (having a b/w laser printer instead of a color inkjet is a challenge but also an opportunity). The same acrylic paint was used for drop caps. The lovely printer’s ornament is from William Morris’ Love Is Enough.

[mythrilthread]

This binding of George Orwell’s 1984 is a birthday gift for a friend.

👁️ I typeset it for B6 format, using Minipax (inspired by this very story) for body font, adding Konstruktor font for extra totalitarian vibes.

👁️ The book is sewn on raised cords with laced on boards (my first time trying this binding method, which I found fiddly but fun!).

👁️ The cover features a variety of materials: red leather, black faux leather, off-white and blue bookcloth, and black paper, with red foil applied with a heat foil quill. (Red foil on red leather looks way nicer in person than on photos.)

👁️ Eye-based cover design for 1984 is by no means original, my version was done with a mix of layering and cutouts.

[mythrilthread]

✨ I’ve been supporting Causa Creations’ gorgeous projects for a long time now, so when I got my copy of The Hidden Isle rulebook (a Forged in the Dark TTRPG that uses tarot cards instead of dice, how cool is that?!) I wanted to rebind it just for the fun of it.

✨ So here it is, bound in blue linen with two ribbon bookmarks and a cool feature I lifted from the era of bookbinding when books were stored horizontally: it’s basically endband with an “ear”. These “ears” provide additional protection to the endband area and reinforce the joining of the textblock and the cover. Originally the books with this feature had two of them, but I plan on storing mine vertically on a shelf, so it only has the one.

✨ And I wanted to make a cover design in holographic foil that would match the style of the Sefirot card and boardgame boxes, so I made the riff on the designs and was ready to rock, buuuut the foil I ordered extremely didn’t work with my foil quill, so I had to pivot. The pivot came in the form of Kamenskaya acrylic ink: they sure are Expensive, but the chameleon colors have such a gorgeous color shift (and one of the colors was such a nice match to my shiny endband thread) that it was completely worth both the money and the fuss of basically freehanding the design on the cover with a white acrylic marker and then going over it with a glas dip pen and my new fancy ink.

[mythrilthread]

Two photo albums I made in class. The larger one fits one 10x15 photo per page, the smaller one is for two photos from one of those mini-printers. This is adhesive-free binding type, with cardstock pages sewn directly to the spine of the album. Decorative paper is from Pepin Press Van Gogh collection.

[mythrilthread]

A fun bookbinding adjusting thing we’ve been doing in class is making boxes. This one is two-tiered (though I had to make a second box to practice making them with dividers because my darling spouse didn’t want any in their box).

[mythrilthread]

This is a binding of a novel in public domain I did for a bookish Secret Santa exchange.

🐾 Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton happened to meet both criteria of the giftee’s wishlist (being my spouse’s childhood favorite AND a book that explains A Lot about how things are made (for example, have you ever wanted to taxidermize an owl?..). But it’s almost impossible to find an edition that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, so I used the text from Project Gutenberg and cleaned up full-page illustrations and diagrams from the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time before holidays to do so with all 300 illustrations (all drawn by the author!), but I will be making the complete edition for our home library eventually.)

🐾 This was my first attempt at a B6 book (trimmed from A5 because I have almost unlimited access to a guillotine and hence am Powerful), and I REALLY like the feel of this format. The margins are intentionally enormous — they are even bigger in the original edition because they contain the majority of the illustrations.

🐾The bookcloth is my second-ever homemade bookcloth (linen backed with kraft paper) and it worked like a charm. I chose the wolf print relief for the cover because E.T. Seton loved wolves so much he officially included a wolf paw print into his signature. How cool is that? The endbands aren’t sewn but they ARE handmade out of soft brown suede.

🐾 The title is painted in copper acrylic paint using a hand-cut stencil. I swear I do not choose the most painful ways to do things on purpose, I just don’t have a cutting machine (yet. I AM in fact capable of learning from my experiences).

🐾 Long-time followers might recognize the tree-trunk pattern on the endpapers — I used it before for my binding of Adult Wolf, and it worked really well for this story, so I gleefully recycled it. The endpapers have an interesting distressed look — I’m still taming my first laser printer. But this marks the first time I used Dorland’s cold wax medium to fix a printed image and I LOVE the effect. I think it works much better than applying pure beeswax and a metric fuckton of elbow grease.

[mythrilthread]

Rebinding of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

🩸 This was my first time working on a book that was published in 1973, so it presented a lot of interesting challenges. I had to clean off old glue from the spine, straighten it, as it was a bit crooked, reinforce it, retrim the edges, then round the spine again. I learned a lot!

🩸 Full leather cover features a hand-foiled design drawn by me. This is part of Margarita’s outfit for the Satan’s Great Ball — her blood-washed skin and a heavy chain with a black poodle medallion.

🩸 The endpapers are a classic illustration by Andrey Kharshak.

🩸 The endbands are very simple, red part marks where the actual novel is in the anthology.

🩸 The edges are painted in Diamine ink Writer’s Blood and polished with a bit of beeswax.

[mythrilthread]

the sea makes bones of bodies by @swordsmans

Meanwhile I’m still working my way through my backlog of textblocks.

🌊 This one was a jaw-droppingly gorgeous typeset by the author of a fantastic luzo mermaid!AU.

🌊 I immediately knew I wanted the cover to feature scales in some way, and settled on this black faux leather (the scales are more snake than fish or shark, but they are So Texture).

🌊 The endpapers are printed on the treacherous red watercolor paper (it also has nice texture but does so love to react badly to any amount of moisture in the adhesive) printed with a Japanese wave pattern.

🌊 I painted the inlay on the cover in Procreate and printed it in 3 layers (I’m still experimenting with achieving the transparent and slightly distressed organic look of riso printing on an inkjet printer).

Very happy with the way this turned out (but also have more ideas for a different edition of this fic)!

[mythrilthread]

The Threads Of Fate Tangle And Twist by Misthios

🧶 My second embroidered cover. With this one I knew I wanted to do embroidery for it right away, but it still took me a long time to just sit myself down and try it. I ended up using a combination of couching and running stitches in character-inspired colors on black linen, and I'm very happy with the result.

🧶 As for the typeset, I knew what I wanted even before I finished reading. To be honest, the chapter titles idea came to me in a flash as soon as I opened chapter index on AO3 :)

🧶 Knot patterns are used for scene dividers and chapter footers, and nice heart-shaped knots in the inner margins mark the sex scene (for easy of skipping if desired).

🧶 The endpapers also feature a thread-themed pattern. I used a faux-riso tecnique (ran the papers through my inkjet printer four times, priting different shades) to imitate riso's transparent ink effect.

[mythrilthread]

This anthology took me a looong time to figure out, first composition-wise, and then the textblock had to wait for some month while I figured out what I wanted to do with the cover. ⚔️👒

💚 My main idea was GREEN, because I wanted to collect my favorite Zoro/Luffy pieces (about being deeply not normal about each other and also about inappropriate use of Gear 5) and use different Japanese woodcuts for each piece. The fancy linework in the typeset was inspired by @swordsmans's style.

💚 The endbands are a random assortment of greens, and the cover is hand stitched on nice emerald green linen. The feel of the book in my hands is well worth my poor pricked all over fingers (I am very new to any kind of embroidery).

The list of works is as follows:

ouroboros by @swordsmans

without guilt by Augment

the color of want by @okayprairie

the only animal by batman

captain's quarters by batman

bone-breaker ospreys mate for life by @swordsmans

burden of proof by batman

gearshift by @starshipcaptainjojo

[mythrilthread]

necro elysium (yuck!!) by @mercyisms

A confession: I LOVE fics that use the Disco Elysium format, and The Locked Tomb is just the perfect fit for this type of AUs (and going over the top with book design). And this one is so so so good!

🫀 I knew I wanted to mimic the layout of the text in DE basically as soon as I finished reading and saw the gorgeous illustration by @smapis.

🫀 The cover is inspired by the description of the card, but instead of trying to recreate it exactly (and messing with glitter) I went for the same theme and the kind of DIY arts and crafts style project vibe. Hence my first buttonhole stitch binding, with the heart painted with chromatographic ink (the color is called Unicorn’s Tears) and inked it over in hot pink with a glass dip pen. I also painted the folds of the pages and filled in some of the frames (where the narrator is YOU).

🫀 The rest of the portraits are cropped out of the aforementioned gorgeous illustration, except for Jod’s, which is a photo of a black hole (presented without comment).

🫀 I always want to play with textures for TLT fics, so this time the cover is black felt over a pink gift bag with nice leather-textured pink endpapers, and the textblock paper is a gorgeous 125gsm half-cotton that bravely took everything I threw at it.

I had so much fun working on this 🥰

[mythrilthread]

Sansûkh (and Tasâlalkhud) by @determamfidd

I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating a lectern book basically since the moment I saw one, and what fic could fit the bill better than the most epic work in a very much epic fandom?

✨ Sansûkh retells the entire story of the Lord of the Rings and then some, so fitting all of it into a single volume was the kind of fuck around and find out idea that is common among ficbinders.

✨ So, I typeset the text in a two-column style, made it way smaller than what I usually go for (but still very much readable!), added footnotes (as opposed the original endnotes) with translation. It turned out to be 1200 pages, which I printed out twice (remember the fuck around and find out part? Textblocks over 10 cm thick do not fit into the guillotine I have access to, and using 70 gsm paper led to a textblock of just over 10 cm. So I had to scrap those 300 sheets of paper and start again with my trusty 60 gsm Ekko paper).

✨ So then, I painted the edges black, sewn 14 cm of endbands, and took a long hard look at my life and my choices. The lecterb case was only made possible thanks to this fantastic doc by @spockandawe and @lootthecoyote's excellent mathing. I’m honestly amazed it turned out so great on the first try (ok, we did construct a mock-up first, but even it only had one mismeasured part and that 100% on me). I also made an inner cover so no parts of the textblock would show indecently. Also! The case even has inner endpapers (all theoretically visible parts are lined with the same paper I used for the actual endpapers, but taking picture of this whole Object was super awkward.)

✨ Not only did I foil the spine, there’s even a foiled design (matching the one on every spread of the pages) inside the Oxford hollow (that’s the creepy black tunnel between the textblock spine and the spine of the inner cover, you can see it in the first photo).

✨ And the most amazing part: it does the thing! Stands on its own, opens nicely and all that. (Though the pages are a bit too light to want to stay put, and you have to hold it open a bit).

I’m very happy with how this turned out!

[mythrilthread]

И нет конца паломничеству by An_Owl_Of_A_Witch

My second (and third) K118, and I feel like I’m getting a hang of this binding type.

The story is a Person of Interest Medieval AU, so I went with a manuscript-esque vibe.

🌈 The cover is black bock (? sheep leather) with the title hand foiled in gold. The spine has three faux cords.

🌈 French double core endbands with a rainbow ;) to echo the illustration.

🌈 Fancy title page has a lightly edited public domain frame, for interlude headers I used a vintage monogram plate, and then used my new iPad and the powers of Procreate for good and drew a manicule (the little hand pointing at the author’s notes) and a square frame to match the monogram plate.

🌈 A linocut of a corvid (I needed a rook but settled for a cute jackdaw) marks each blank page (I started each chapter on the right page, so they were a handful of those).

🌈 The author helpfully included a whole reading list with the sources of their historical research, so I checked all the links and made them into a fancy QR-code pattern.

🌈 This edition also features a very special surprise - a poem by @agest inspired by this very story.

P.S.: I also made the rosary used for the photos, it’s a gift for a dear friend.