todays bird
if i look back, i am lost
Janaina Medeiros
shark vs the universe
YOU ARE THE REASON
Product Placement
Claire Keane
Stranger Things
cherry valley forever
Love Begins
No title available
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
No title available
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Sweet Seals For You, Always
almost home
Sade Olutola
tumblr dot com
Misplaced Lens Cap
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United States
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@perfectlynormalbooks
Sunless Knights by MacBudgie / @mushroomlasagna - a Hollow Knight/Sunless Skies crossover!! Casebound in folio. One copy for me, one copy for the author. Both games have very unique aesthetics, so I had fun figuring out ways to incorporate the iconography into the design.
made a notebook for my friend :)
Hi, just wondering if you sell that amazing Shimeji Simulation binding? Thanks in advance. Regards, JP
Sorry, nope! I did three copies of that and it was a nightmare and more than enough. Never making any of those ever again. If you want one, you'll have to put in the work yourself, I'm afraid. Thanks for asking though.
the hands of god by @heartslogos - Genshin Impact, 134k, bound at folio size with rounded + backed spine! This copy made for @shadowling-guistical as a whimsical and slightly nerdy wedding gift.
I had a lot of friends consult with me re: the themes and design, since I've never actually played GI myself. We ended up with a cover inspired by the in-game icon for the Folio of Foliage. Used HYWenHei (very close to the official Genshin font, from what I can tell) for headings and titles, as well as a very fun leafy font called Nabel for dropcaps. Body text in Alegreya. Endpages from Andersen's (i picked up a bunch of real pretty paper while in Sydney, expect to see more of it whenever I post next)
Little tree on the bookmark. For knowledge. :>
Tiny Books Bang 2025 @renegadeguild - I bound @perfectlynormalbooks’s typeset of Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
Sextodecimo, printed to be A8 size and trimmed down somewhat due to printer margins being a pain to deal with, so this is also the tiniest book I have ever made!
The cover papers are marbled by Jemma Lewis and chosen for the wooshy bits, which to me feel very sci-fi (space travel, anyone?). The endpapers I chose because they reminded me of binary code and the “falling” text in The Matrix. I was trying to combine a digital feel with a very traditional medium!
I wanted the copies to match, but not be identical, so the typesetter’s copy has blue bookcloth, a blue bookmark ribbon, and blue and golden endbands, while mine has green.
I also made a miscalculation when I cut the marbled paper down, so I was short - and so the back of my copy wound up looking like that 😂 in addition to all the other little flaws as my copy was also the practice copy. I’m really happy with how both copies came out though!
Three-volume quarto binding of Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know by Cyan Wings, a webnovel I haven't got around to reading just yet (but now that I have all of it in physical form, I really should start on soon-ish). Thank you to @spockandawe for supplying me with the typeset!!
I don't know much about the plot beyond the broadest strokes, so I kept the cover design fairly simple - identical in design apart from the main cover color to distinguish the three. The cutouts are filled with faux-vellum, which I printed the title/author on, and the endpapers are real marbled paper which I picked up from Andersen's bindery earlier this year. very glad to finally have this one done!!
Peeta’s Games by igsygrace, for my recipient in the AUS/NZ Autumn binding exchange (who does not have Tumblr, to my knowledge). (In the time since I sent this book off, the fic in question has been removed from AO3, so... no links this time!)
The inset cutout was a fun experiment, inspired by one of @celestial-sphere-press's alternate cover design suggestions from this post. Absolute pain to piece together, but has a really nice overall effect.
Rebind of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, a book which is about mythology except when it isn’t.
Harnessing What Remains by @wynn-ing - Slay the Princess, 72k, folio. TWO COPIES!! ONE FOR ME ONE FOR THE AUTHOR!! OBVIOUSLY!!!
Okay, so, I may have lost my mind a little when I did this one, because I fully illustrated it. There's close to 50 individual illustrations in this whole thing - I made a point of doing one for the first page of each chapter, and then I ended up doing extras, especially for the last few. As such, there's way too much art here to post it all to Tumblr... which is why it's excellent that the author has given me kind permission to share the full typeset, so other people can peruse it (and bind your own copy, if you want!). Here you go!!
I played around with using a lot of the game's fonts and formatting, so while the regular text is Georgia - DejaVu Sans, Kelmscott Roman, East Sea Dokdo and Amatic SC are all used at various points! The 'scary' Princesses in particular have their text in shades of red, too!
I really like the way that Slay the Princess uses color very sparingly and only for jarring emphasis, so I wanted to lean into that with the illustration style and typeset. THERE'S A LOT GOING ON IN THIS BOOK. I wish I knew what to say about it!! I may talk about design choices later!!!! Prompted or unprompted!!!! I'm just super glad I finally get to actually share it publicly!!!
...I also got really sad that I couldn't draw any of Wynn's OCs from the rest of the series because I just didn't have the time to do the other stories... so I ended up drawing all of them anyway. The post is over here. I'm so pleased with them.
And just for fun: a bunch of notebook sketches and doodles from when I was trying to figure out what sort of character design and style vibe I wanted to go for!
Animal Farm by George Orwell, done in casebound quarto! A last-minute binding for a local arts and crafts competition (and I came in third place for this, well done me). Kept it pretty simple, both in terms of typeset and cover design - Georgia for main body text, CoventryGarden for all of the titles.
A banned truth
Are you okay
hey do you happen to take commissions? I saw your work for the Sacred and Terrible Air by Kurvitz. I would love a printed copy of the novel but idk if I could do a good enough job for it. Do you think there's any chance you could make one as a commission?
I do take commissions, but not for that book - for one thing, the typeset (and translation) aren't mine, and although the typesetter/translator gave me gracious permission to use them for personal use, I don't feel comfortable reusing their work for profit. Thank you for asking, though!
retypeset/bind of The Beginning by K. A. Applegate, the final book of the Animorphs series! Done as a gift for a friend as thanks for managing a very long-running Animorphs book club for us. Did my best to match the internal styling and fonts of the original paperback books, while still having a little fun with the cover and design.
Book Decoration: AKA All The Ways I Don't Use a Cricut
(this post is for people who don't want to buy an expensive cutting tool, or for those that do have an expensive cutting tool that would like to mix things up a little)
1. Print That Shit
If you're already printing your own textblocks, an easy step for titles is to print them. Above is a title printed onto an "obi" of decorative paper. I measured out where I wanted things on the finished book and laid it out in Affinity, then printed it on a full sheet & trimmed it down to wrap around the book. A more simple method is to print & glue on the label into a slight indent in the cover (to protect it). A third option is to do the spine in bookcloth, while you print on paper for the cover and then glue that paper onto the boards (this usually looks even better when it is a three-piece bradel bind).
2. Foil Quill / Heat Pens
The heat pen is one of my go-to tools, but it can be a bit touchy about materials. The most popular version is the We R Memory Keepers' Foil Quill (which is one of the most ergonomic), but other pens exist that can get you to a higher heat temp, finer lines, or more consistent foil. For example, I have a pen created by a local Japanese bookbinding studio that fares way better on leathers than the WRMK quill & with a finer tip, but it's hell to control. Best results in general are on paper or smooth bookcloth (starched linen, arrestox, colibri - even duo will work but its less solid). The fuzzier a bookcloth is, the less your foil quill wants to deal with it. This means the heat n bond method of making bookcloth does not play nice with a heat pen usually, but there are two solutions: 1) use this tutorial on paste + acrylic medium coated bookcloth instead that will get you a perfect surface for the heat pen, or 2) use the pen on paper & then glue onto the cloth. I did a video tutorial for both foil quill use and this type of homemade bookcloth for @renegadeguild Binderary in 2023.
You get the most consistent results by tracing through a printed template that is taped in place, as I do in the video above.
3. Paint That Shit
Acrylic paints will do you fine! The above is free-handed with a circle template, because I wanted that vibe. If you need straight lines that won't seep, lay them down with tape first & then paint over it first with a clear Acrylic medium, then your color. Same goes for stencils. Two more examples of painted bookcloth:
4. IT'S GOT LAYERS
By using layers of thinner boards, you can create interesting depths & contrasts on your cover. You can also make cutouts that peep through to the decorative paper behind. The most important part to this technique is the order in which each edge is wrapped. To get a good wrapped inside edge, you will split the turn in into tabs to get them to conform to a curve. You can also layer multiple colors of bookcloth without multiple layers of board, as seen below left, so long as you mind your cut edges for fraying.
5. Inlaid... anything
Mirrors! Marbled paper! I saw someone do a pretty metal bookmark once! The key is creating a little home for it to live in, which is pretty similar to the above layering method. On one layer you cut the shape, & glue that layer onto the bottom solid board before covering. You can do the top layer as an entire 1 mm board (like I did for the mirrors) or a sheet of cardstock, like I would use for inlaid paper.
6. Decorative Paper
Decorative paper is always helpful & adds to the paper hoard... & its effects can be layers with other techniques, as below. Marbles, chiyogami, momi, or prints & maps of all kinds can be great additions. Some papers may need a protective coating (such as wax or a sealer).
7. Stamps (with optional linocut)
While I've not used many more regular rubber stamps, I do know some who have, successfully! And I've used one once or twice with embossing powder (see photo 3 up, the gold anchor on the little pamphlet bind). What also works is to carve your own linocut or stamp, & then use block printing ink to ink it onto your fabric (as i did above). A bit time intensive, but it was nice how easily reproducible it was, and I liked the effect I got for this particular bind.
These methods are not exhaustive, just ones I've used, and there are of course many others. I haven't gone too into detail on any of these for the sake of length (& post photo limits) but feel free to ask about more specifics. Usually I'm using them in combination with other options.
The Courting Season by @anarchycox (The Witcher TV, 47k), casebound at folio size for @silentsunpress as part of the Renegard 2024 binder's exchange!
I leaned into a flowery, elegant design for this one, and used a lot of William Morris assets and motifs to decorate the cover and typeset, and the result is really nicely cohesive - I even embroidered the cover and gold-foiled the edges!! Fonts used: Georgia (for body text) and Felix Titling (for titling).
trying to make the leap into learning binding in order to fix up some old favorite paperbacks of mine that are starting to fall apart. the thing that i'm most concerned about is the fact that some of them are old enough the paper is crunchy/wobbly - like it has that wrinkly look? several are secondhand buys, so it's possible they got wet at some point, but equally possible they're just old and the paper is extremely thin. i worry that it won't glue well, or that it'll tear away from the binding if it's opened up and read with any consistency. i have some experience in book repair as i work at a library, but most the things i repair are hardbacks whose spines are coming undone at the front or back covers. a bit of norbond and some tape is usually all it takes to keep those going another couple years. when i have to repair paperbacks, i'm pickier and we usually wind up replacing them, so this is uncharted territory for me. do you have any tips for making sure that a rebound old paperback with stiff, inflexible paper winds up sturdy and not liable to fall right apart again?
Unfortunately, I don’t really have experience with that sort of thing. Most of my rebinds are for fairly new books, and I rarely have to deal with damaged or old paper. I could make some guesses as to how to deal with this, but they’d only be guesses. If anyone else wants to weigh in on this and give some advice, I think it would be very welcome
Mr. Brightside and the Atomic Bomb by @olivieblake. 129k, Original Work, rounded + backed at folio size! (+ accompanying slipcase, as usual with bindings I'm worried about sending in the mail.) A musical magical murder mystery set to the works of the Killers.
Done for lilithbindsanderads on Instagram for the Australian Spooky Season bookbinding exchange! This is fully illustrated, with a different doodle-border at the start of every chapter, and different scene break doodles all throughout. I pulled the same trick I did with The Strange Mixtape for all of the incidental musical numbers, so you can listen along as you read if you so choose.
Typeset in Georgia for the body text, with Bivoac Regular for the chapter titles and a neat font called Sam's Town for the big chapters and headings.
I played very hard into the lurid bright colors for this one, because it's a flashy dramatic story about performers, singers, and MURDER. It makes it a very hard binding to photograph well... but it's so pretty to look at. I'm so, so happy with it.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewksi - hardcover rebind of my own softcover copy, because a book like this deserves a fancy hardcover edition.
Tried some fun new tricks with this one - I sewed on headbands to it, with a thin strip of House-colored blue in the centres, and an even thinner strip of red within that. Used wax paper transfer to press the polaroid photographs from the original spine onto the fore-edges. The black square on the front and back is an inset lined with black velvet. This is a very, very nice book to hold. Can't wait to settle down in my lovely house and reread it all over again wait why are the walls moving
