I've got a two-part series of books to share today! This is The Profane Comedy by Mussimm. The Sandford Flower Show is the first (and shorter) part of this Good Omens series, post-season one but not s2 compliant, and it involves another demon crossing paths with our main pair while they are still pining and angsting and not talking about what they want. It's fantastic, in character, and has a happy ending...unless you want to dive into the second fic, Tabula Rasa, which is not a sequel but rather a what-if AU of the end of the first fic. Basically, if we had gotten the Bad Ending in Sandford, how would that play out, is it possible to fix that and if so, how. I haven't seen a lot of series structured like this and I really loved this one.
The fics individually are 46k and 78k, making them the right length for one big volume or two little ones and I went with the second option. They're legal quartos, a little thicker than I usually do in this format. For materials we have lineco black book cloth (terrible to work with, I've used it a lot before in other colors but the black wants to pick up every bit of dust and glue and mystery residue in a five-mile radius), homemade book cloth with the flower print, a little bit of black ribbon to cover the joint, and gold foil HTV. I have had the floral print cloth for, I kid you not, probably 15 years. Long before I ever learned bookbinding. I used to love going through the fabric remnant bins and picking out a couple even though I didn't sew or do any crafts that used it, and when I first contemplated doing this story I knew this would be on it. I will learn all the wrong lessons about hoarding craft supplies from this.
More photos under the cut!
The cloth wraps all the way around the book. This was tricky as I don't usually line my cases with paper, just glue directly to the cloth, and doing that here resulted in little gaps right in the hinge where the cloth wasn't connected to anything. So I had to go back and line them afterwards. I also managed to mis-measure twice in making the case for part 2, resulting in having to re-trim the fore edge and cut down a too-large turn in. As a result the books are not as identical as I'd like, but I only had this one skinny piece of cloth so I couldn't do it over. It worked out fine but was very nerve-wracking. I wasn't sure about the black ribbon (to hide slivers of naked board) but once they were on it was clearly the right choice. I went with only volume numbers on the spine, since the cover is kind of busy with all the titles.
The books are really clearly a set, but they aren't the same. The endbands are handmade and the same pattern but in two different colors, chosen to match the endpapers (my favorite way to do it). Speaking of which:
Chiyogami endpapers, with peonies. Peonies are a recurring motif and symbol in the story, so once I knew these were out there there really wasn't any other choice. Sandford has the pink ones, the classic, sweeter ones to suit its happy ending. Tabula has the darker ones, given that it starts with the Bad Ending as its jumping-off point. Hilariously, this was a decision born of necessity. They were originally supposed to both have pink, but when I went to buy them in one of ChibiJay's paper packs they only had enough pink ones to do one book. The dark ones were a substitute. But I love them so much, it really couldn't have worked out better if I planned it that was from the start.
The books have the same title page with just the text switched out. I grabbed the images from rawpixel and just flipped them around to make a frame. It's one vertical banner and one horizontal one, carefully arranged so you don't realize it. I am only now noticing that they author's name is underlines in Tabula. That wasn't intentional and I have no idea how it happened. Oops.
First page of each book. Same banner as the title page. I flipped them around to make it feel like a perspective change. Everything in Tabula feels wrong, it's not the future we want for any of these characters, so flipping it feels like a weird funhouse mirror. It's unbalanced. That was on purpose. Makes them work together, interlocked, because you won't notice this unless you read both.
I dug up a fancy ornament for the section breaks. This is one of the many dingbat fonts from dafont, though I don't remember which one. Everything is floral in these binds, all the way through. It's ornate, it's beautiful, it's cloying, it's overwhelming, and I wanted that to follow through the whole story. And it worked!
And that's that! I still have a couple to share from this batch of binds, though I don't know when I'll get to them. Check out my sideblog @papersnakepress if you want to see more before then.
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Can you guys watch my fairy tale prince with the lamb motif and my jaded knight who sees himself as nothing more than a starving and desperate wolf while I step out for a moment? And DON'T 🫵 let them kiss.
