I finally slapped together a tutorial on my process for making inlays with my Silhouette Cameo 4! For higher quality you can visit my Instagram.
This is of course not applicable to all designs; if you have a design that goes across the spine and back cover, you will likely want to forego the transfer tape and attach your design to a piece of paper instead.
It should be noted that I am an amateur, and this is simply the method that works best for me personally.
So I was trying to source that kinda thin bible paper ( Scritta paper). For my bible bind of Manacled And since I think you have to be a publisher to get any decent amount of paper. I found Tomoe River paper makes a decent substitute for that thin paper. It’s just see through enough that it’s not distracting. I found mine on Amazon but I’m sure any paper specialty website will have them.
I read Map for the first time last year, and a couple months later decided to already reread it. The first time around, you’re dropped into this story without knowing what’s going on in terms of either the character dynamics or the setting, and it’s like a puzzle you get to try to figure out. It’s delightful! The second time around, you start out with a lot more puzzle pieces at hand (but absolutely not all of them yet!) and you manage to connect so many more dots. (I swore to myself to not go overboard and still ended up with a ten-way colour-coding system with stickers and writing margin notes. More recently, I decided to read all the comments on the Map AO3 pages, and they are so much fun to read! So many readers have shared really insightful observations, and the author has written a lot of very interesting replies as well. But having to switch back and forth between the story and the comment section is a bit of a bother, and I sensed an interesting typographical challenge, and that’s how I found myself typesetting the fic again while adding foot- and margin notes to my heart’s content. The book ended up being so long though that I decided to split it into two parts :-)
As for the cover of the first half: Each of the DTA fics introduces you—and the main characters—to a new, larger part of the world. In Map, the focus lies on Cas’s cabin as the foundation for the relationship between the two main characters is laid, so Dean and the reader have to open the bead curtain together to get to that part of the story. If I ever get around to giving a similar treatment to the other fics in the series, the cover design would continue correspondingly: opening the gate to Chitaqua for Stars, entering Ichabod’s main square for Lights, and stepping through one of the paintings in the white room for Game.
Here are a few delightful wood engravings from a recent gift showing the various processes that go into binding a book. This little pamphlet is entitled A Short History of Bookbinding and a Glossary of Styles and Terms Used in Binding … .printed in London at the Chiswick Press for the bookbinder Joseph William Zaehnsdorf in 1895.These images were probably printed from metal plates that were made from the original wood engravings. The engravings are not attributed, as was the case for most commercial engravings.
Click or tap on the images to see the definitions for these activities as provided in the booklet’s glossary.
So, a little while back, @pyrrhlc very graciously offered to send me a copy of Child Ballad he had bound, and naturally I was very hyped to accept this offer but (a) I live on the other side of the Atlantic, and (b) any packages I receive at my home address must go through my super, who is both daffy and an asshole, and has kept packages from me for time spans ranging from a week to three months to “denying he ever saw it,” so I was hesitant. But I worked out with my friend who lives in a nicer building that it could be delivered c/o her, so I was very excited about that.
Then there was some trivial misadventuring with the USPS, so I had to ask my friend to go fetch it from the post office for me. “It’s very pleasing to the eye!” she texted me, and I ran uptown to behold the wonder.
Now, the box was slightly bigger than I had anticipated, but I was initially just thinking I didn’t think Child Ballad was that long but I too would be worried about sending intricately-made art over the ocean so extra packing makes sense and joining my friend in admiring the box.
Please note the pattern of the paper. (I actually recognized it from a tumblr post of pyrrhlc’s.)
My friend and I carefully unwrapped it, at which point, she said, “you should make an unboxing video!” and I was not about to wait long enough to do anything that fancy but I did take pictures and look:
WHAT
WHAT
Friends. Comrades. Seen here now at home on my desk:
FOUR BOOKS.
Four extremely beautiful books! Plus an enclosed note with a handsome crow (the books are from the Black Crow Bindery!) which contains kind words about my fics and also edifying facts about the patterns on the covers! The Service Work ones are based on wallpaper from the 1880s! They all have pretty ribbons and handsome Baskerville typeface!
The two Service Work books also have these pretty metal corner guards which probably have a technical name I am unaware of! Tumblr won’t let me add more pictures! You can kind of see them in the others, though!
They are all very beautiful! I am very grateful! Please admire @pyrrhlc’s artistry in this as well as in his writing! I am admiring them on my bookshelf as I speak!
My first bind was that of Solus by FettsOnTop(GTFF)
There was so so many things I've messed up with this.
From the covers bending. The spine board too wide. The cloth not being fully glued down. The thread not staying glued. To no mull and shifting signatures.
BUT and here's the big one for me- IT WAS A BOOK!
Just like how Tolkien mentioned that Bilbo couldn't begin his adventure without stepping out his door, I couldn't call myself a binder WITHOUT doing these mistakes and creating my first book. It's not fancy. But it is MY FIRST BOOK
My magnum opus, the jewel of my Binderary round-up, the result of four months of hard work (that is to say, a lot of force applied over distance), the project affectionately known as The Motherfuckers (because it was rather unclear if I was going to finish these books or if they were going to be the end of me).
Force over Distance by cleanwhiteroom. It is currently also on AO3.
I was first introduced to this incredible story by a dear friend, who first sold me on actually watching SGU, and then said that they remember this fic since like 2011, which is always a promising sign. I went digging and found out I was in luck - the story was being rewritten and reuploaded on the author's blog. The next two weeks are described by the same friend as "one of the scariest moments in our cohabitation" as I'd spent literally every waking moment injecting the story directly into my eyeballs, and let me tell you, I'd not been doing a lot of sleeping at that time.
Then I gathered up my courage and reached out to CWR re: my burning desire to bind this story. And the rest, well. Let's dig into it, shall we?
This was my first time typesetting 540k words. Considering I tend to prefer larger font sizes for increased legibility, it was immediately obvious that this was going to be a multivolume project. I settled on three, as it's the relationship between three individuals that forms the core of the story.
I also knew I wanted to keep the typeset in black and white, but play around with light and dark a lot. So I did. One of the first design idea I actually had was the way I wanted to handle projected speech. Mental link between Young, Rush and Destiny is THE most vital part of the story, and I wanted to make it immediatly obvious. I also wanted to be able to take one glance at the page and tell how much of the action is actually just two guys staring each other down :) Hence the blackout effect of thoughts being represented as light over darkness.
I also wanted to preserve as much of my reading experience as possible. So I saved all the chapter quotes/summaries in the TOC, and hid the chapter content warnings in the frame of the gate that marks the beginning of each chapter. For most of the chapter the warnings stay the same, so after a while you stop really noticing them, but then you open a new chapter and see that the familiar shape of the words has changed, and get this UH-OH feeling. Which, I think is very much how it works in my design, because when the warnings change there's usually another line of text added.
For flashbacks and dream sequences I switched from italics to a lighter shade of gray. I woudn't say it's more legible per say, but it's in keeping with the overall light/dark theme.
There are instances of people using handwritten notes in the story. I collected more than a dozen of assorted handwriting fonts, with each character having their own "handwriting". So when, for example, someone begins writing in someone else's hand, you immediately know it.
The most insane, labor-intensive part of the typeset, however, was the way I decided to handle the Ancient translations. CWR's gone through the trouble of setting up hover-to-discover for it, which gives you a very different reading experience than, say, having the translations in the endnotes. So, naturally, I said to myself that I want to replicate that, and footnotes just won't do the trick. So. Every instance of Ancient in the text has an underlay of light gray Ancient script. And an OVERLAY of paper vellum with the translation printed in blue. Now, not to toot my own horn too much, but if looks SICK AS FUCK. You also MAYBE SHOULD NOT LIVE LIKE THIS. For the two copies of this work I had to cut up 10 sheets of vellum into strips, and then spent from 20 minutes to an hour per volume tipping the strips in their proper places. I then had to wear kinetic tape on both my hands to help with the joint pain. (It was worth it.)
Now for the title spread. It is also paper vellum that you see as soon as you turn the first page (the half-title), and see it covering the title of the book and author's name. And then you turn it. And the shields sing the matter wave of Destiny through the black. And yeah, I think that's very, very clever of me, actually.
Then, of course, were the endpapers. All 12 of them are unique abstract paintings done on black cardstock by hand with brush pens and correction tape, I scanned a sample of each set for posterity. All of them are my interpretations of characters' midscapes. For volume 1 I went with the fire wind of Rush's thoughts. Volume 2 was for Young, and I went for the reverse blackout poetry effect (because for all the mental talking they do, the unprojected thoughts are opaque to their counterparts) and all the loops, hairpins and blocks he does. Volume 3 is for the combination - Rush's fire wind, changing its color to match the circuitry pattern of Destiny's AI.
The rest, in comparison, is easy. All volumes are stitched with 3 strands of embroidery floss, a combination of black, blue and silvery-gray. The French double-core endbands are sewn in the same color scheme (though with a different shade of blue and gray switched for white for added contrast). The edges are painted and splattered to look like space.
The covers feature my (signature at this point, I guess) half-cloth river pattern, with the base being dark blue linen and the printed parts being Spitzer telescope images of the W51 star forge, Jack-O'-Lantern Nebula and the Eagle Nebula (courtesy of NASA), waxed by hand for added sheen. The spines are foiled in silver with a foil quill.
Each set is 5 pound of solid hand-crafted book, with one set being my personal copy, and the other sent as a gift to the author.
And that's it, folks! This has been an incredible project to work on, and I'm very proud of what I achieved with it.
I made this zine last year to teach Japanese stab binding. It's a technique that every artist should know—with just a few tools, it's so easy to bind your own sketchbook or to make a physical version of your art/writing/etc.
Download the PDF version (with bonus photos & tips!)
I've got a new fic bind! Today I want to show off @wrenaspun's lovely fic, All This and Heaven Too. It's seriously so good and so sweet, Lamen mixed with fairytales and legends (my favorite) and it's written so beautifully. Go check it out!
Anyway, here's the bind:
It's another binding like my Captive Prince short stories bind, with the cloth on the spine and then cardstock for the printed cover. The lighthouse illustration was a custom image done by my boyfriend and I think it turned out wonderfully!
More details about the binding process under the cut.
So since this is a shorter story than some of the others I went back to a 4x6 book. It still feels very nice in hand though, I think I'm getting better at either setting the textblock in the case or just measuring better (probably that last one, I'm usually too impatient to measure correctly) but these two books are probably some of the nicest set books I've made yet.
The back has a little flourish on it too, just to spice things up a little.
Endpapers are from Wagara Studio, I seriously love this chiyogami paper, it's almost like fabric and it's so easy to use. Setting this book and my previous binding were so easy with this paper. It would make an awesome cover as well, it seems really durable.
Some inside pics, the title page and the little section break image. I really love the title page image and I kind of wish I would have done that for the cover, but the design is so detailed that it would be impossible to do with HTV and it's too big to just do with the cardstock. So it had to be split like it is, but I'm still glad this picture got included.
The bookcloth is really not this stripey/checkery, I don't know why it came out like this in pictures. Ignore the mess in the back. I have to for sure clean up my little table before starting on the next project.
Anyway, not too many notes on the actual binding process this time. I did end up making an entire cover--HTV and everything--that turned out to be too small (remember that thing I said about me being mad at measuring?) because I made the spine 9mm instead of 10mm and like a dummy I forgot to test it with the textblock before doing all the work of finishing the cover. That one mm is such a small difference but it meant that the book couldn't be closed and so I had to scrap it and start over. Gonna be testing my covers for sure before I spend so much time on the design work. Gutters on this were 5mm, foiling on the cloth (I think it's dubletta cloth) was done with HTV, foiling on the cardstock cover was done with toner reactive foil.
Author copy will soon be on its way! Everyone please wish it good luck with the postal gods.
Next year, SenLinYu’s Harry Potter fic Manacled will disappear from Archive of Our Own. They don’t want to take it down, but it’s the only w
As promised! I wrote about the illegal fanbinding that's led to writers deleting their works recently, how that connects to the current pull-to-publish wave, and what happens when the rapidly expanding sphere of fic readers starts to get disconnected from *fandom*:
The ever-increasing reach of fanfiction has inched the practice away from text-written-in-community to a more traditional author-reader relationship—and the context collapse that’s come with viral works being treated like any other romance novel has spurred clashes between different types of readers with different sets of expectations.
In the past few years, fic authors across all corners of fandom have increasingly complained about shifting attitudes from readers who treat them like any other content creator, demanding the next chapter as you might demand your favorite influencer’s next video. But unlike on creative platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the fic writer doesn’t get revenue from their new installment.
We'll also talk about this in some capacity on the next episode of @fansplaining! (In contrast with today's episode, on the non-monetized, gift-economy practices of many fanbinders, whose hobby is also imperiled by the people selling and buying fic.)
I was gonna reblog with a comment how a lot of the people in my bookbinding group dislike the selling of fic binds for these precise reasons, but it turns out that you already mentioned Renegade in the article as a group with strong opinions on fandom as gift economy
we are also... quite familiar (derogatory) with people clamoring to buy binds of Manacled in particular... there was apparently a large wave of people asking for that fic some time before I joined the server (and getting turned down because that's not the kind of thing Renegade is intended for)
Fanbinding is great! Selling fanfiction binds, especially without author permission and expressly against their desires? Not great!
Second book was for a valentine day exchange. I don’t read anything Dramione or HP. But this was a fun one. It’s called Between Us Flows the Nile by thebrightcity. Sadly with the all of the illegal fanbinding that’s been hitting Etsy, the story has been since taken down. But it was fun to experiment with a more 1920’s, art deco Egyptomia feel to this. The story is a 1920s Egypt sort of The Mummy AU. Beautifully written. The lesson I learned with this one is to go with the flow. Enjoy the journey! Also fancy foiled paper doesn’t print well on printers. 😅
The spine is Duo Magpie.
Covers; card stock paper that was cut to size and printed on a laser printer.
#bindery2024 just ended and I’m super excited to share the 2 books I managed to finish this year!
The first one I did this month and year was a sketchbook! The inside is blank, perfect for writing, notes, doodling, anything really. The spine is bookcloth and the covers are csrdstock. Same for the front- it’s just a Star Wars comic line art I found and printed on my laser printer. I messed up with this one. Getting endpapers aligned is still the death of me. That being said! I love the look and feel of this book. I love how I can carry a nerdy sketchbook around and customize it to ME!
