Renegade Bookbinding Guild is a not-for-profit group of artists engaged in fanbinding—focusing on extremely limited edition fannish works, including fanfiction, meta, original fic, zines and other works. Most works are made in handmade editions of one or two copies. We are a transformative community connected by shared values, goals, work, and stories. We value fanfiction and fanwork in all its forms, and our fannish culture’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Members work self-directed, selecting works to bind individually. We are building a physical archive book by book, zine by zine, pamphlet by pamphlet, collected on our shelves, gifted to the author, exchanged as gifts among each other or given to friends.
Members of Renegade Bookbinding Guild agree to our Code of Conduct, which upholds the values of our community and can be accessed here.
@armoredsuperheavy started fanbinding independently in 2018. After their guerrilla bookbinding manifestos went viral in 2020, they created the fanbinding Discord server. So began the Renegade Bindery, our digital workshop and community space.
Renegade Bindery is on Discord, if you would like to join please check out the invite on our website. It is 18+ only, and it is not required to be a member of the Guild to participate in the discord.
Our site is maintained by volunteers of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild. The Guild was first established as Renegade Publishing August 17th, 2020, and we updated our name to the Renegade Bookbinding Guild on February 2, 2024.
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This is one of those fics that I loved so much that I knew I was going to bind it as soon as I finished it. Especially since I'd recently created a typeset for Persuasion that I knew would work perfectly for this fic.
Some new techniques I used for this bind:
First time I did a cutout on the cover. I wanted to have it peek through the end papers but I just could not figure out how to do it. So I decided to mount the art on the backside of the cover and then hide it behind the endpapers.
First time I speckled the edges! It's not nearly as messy as I thought it'd be, but I do have an extreme aversion to the texture of toothbrush bristles, so I had to be a grown up and get over it, because it is the easiest way to do these.
The endpapers on my bind were made by my beautiful and lovely friend @maleekamolscreates, and the ones I used for Fluffy's bind are my beloved Ink Drops cardstock.
I used white HTV for the lettering on my copy, but silver on the author copy (which now I wish I'd used on mine, but no big deal.)
The gorgeous art was made by @substellaris, commissioned by @upon-poppyhills.
I'm super happy about this bind, but the best part is that I didn't accidentally title it "The Distinguished Gentleman" like my brain really really wanted me to.
Projects 46-48, Binds 64-67, and Binderary Books #s 5,6,&7
Asteroidea (Series) by etothepii
Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc (Series) by etothepii
Things you don’t tell me (Series) by etothepii
Completed: February 14&15, 2026
Size: Quarto. (16,253 words, 136 pages) (20,213 words, 163 pages) (23,174 words, 186 pages)
A trilogy of Sherlock quartos with three stories each. I distinctly remember reading these fics back on LiveJournal and was bracing myself to try to figure out how to harvest/format from Dreamwidth when I discovered they had been posted to AO3 as well. Happy days. Highly recommend, especially if you like crossovers. The His Dark Materials fusion is delightfully odd and the addition of the Addams family to the Sherlock universe is the perfect explanation for how even keeled Watson can be.
Not too much to say about the typesets. They are meant to look as similar as possible, all using the same fonts and formatting (Bell MT for body and Poor Richard for titles/headers if you’re interested in that minutiae). I waffled for ages about whether to do the set as quartos or octavos. Wordcount-wise the smaller size may have made more sense, but I wanted something a little taller, if slimmer, on my shelves.
The aesthetics of the binds themselves were determined by finds at my local creative re-use store when I stumbled upon a pack of fairly plain paper from the early 2010s and a partially used pad of decorative cardstock. The single sheets made the perfect coordinating set of endpapers for the trio.
OKAY, LADS. Got a long post today, because I've been Experimenting. So there's nothing that brings me more delight than uncovering and trying new niche binding styles. I'm a little limited in that i only want styles that can contain a nice big novel, which excludes a lot of art book styles, which means that i get really excited when i find something truly different, like the k118. And for a few years. I've been ruminating on ben elbel's pixel bindings.
And for me, following a tutorial or taking a class... does not spark as much joy as rummaging around on my own and making my own mistakes. This fell by the wayside for a while, probably because I wasn't that experienced when i found out about it, slash I didn't have a story in mind with the right aesthetic. But it never left my mind. And when I found out about the genealogy of this style, with forerunners like alain taral combining bookbinding and woodworking (and marquetry! be still my beating heart) and the articulated binding style developed for italian phonebooks in the seventies, I was reinvigorated.
Oh, and the issue of wanting a book thematically compatible with pixel binding? That's gotta be C Language Cultivation, babey!
So, pixel binding. The broad concept is that it's a semi-flexible cover style created with squares of board material (pixels) hinged together with the covering material. I understood the principles. I bought 3mm tile spacers years ago for this exact project. It was still an ADVENTURE in iterative experiments. These are all C Language Cultivation, and from right to left, i shall call them v1, v2, and v3. And in the end, they were *also* an experiment in different materials. But for all of them, i went in with cover board squares, spaced, and with my turn-ins finished with doublures before casing in.
V1! I knew I was probably going to run into some unforseen game-breaking issue with this one, so I didnt sweat it too hard. I got my thinnest board (0.5mm), faux suede bookcloth, and i even misprinted my book (note the untrimmed fore edge) and just went for it anyways. I lined with more bookcloth. It's not a great book, the boards are awfully thin for the size of the book, my shoulders are HILARIOUSLY large, and my doublures want to come up at the corners, but it works! And the covers are NICE and flexible.
V2! I felt confident, and it was time to break out the real leather. But my DREAM was to bind this in those old school royal blue compiler colors, and i didn't want to risk my good hide just yet, so i grabbed some hand-me-down goat. I did manage to goof things up by cutting my hide too large, needing to trim down some turn-ins after the pixels were in place, and then not being able to pare them. It's lined with paper rather than bookcloth, and despite trying to be careful, i DID punch through it once while trying to work it into the hinges. I also used my BEEFY board, 2.5mm, and the cover feels sooooo nice and luxe, but it is.... very, very stiff. Comparably.
(i am also struggling like HELL to get my squares right. this is a style that really prefers notebooks over actual story contents that need precise trimming and margins, but im stubborn.)
Okay!!! At this stage I was big confident and big impatient, and for v3, it was time for the good leather. I went for the same dimensions as the v2 case and tried to trim my text block less (mixed success). I measured my cover dimensions including the tile spacers and cut my hide to size and pared it carefully. And I went with in-between 1mm board and lined with paper, but was more careful with it. It was nearly, nearly brilliant. This was also a hand-me-down hide, and halfway through assembling the cover I realized... it was probably sheep. And sheep wants to screw you over and delaminate when it gets wet. The book is not bad at all, but it's undeniable that the hinges on v2 are MUCH more elegant and crisp than for v3.
But despite that, it's a very exciting success! Look at that FLEX! I'm almost definitely going to do a v4 (sob) when i get some blue goat hide (soon!), and this was a really cool set of iterations. There's all kinds of interesting quirks, like how i realized it was best for turn-ins and doublures to avoid having edges land too close to a hinge. Or one of the things that came down from alain taral's techniques is that for the best opening action the endpapers flyleaves are a single U-shaped sheet, laminated to the first and last pages of the text block, and then the book isn't cased in at the cover boards, but along the spine. I was so skeptical at first, but i gave all of my books the dangle test, and they performed admirably!!
If I hadn't accidentally used sheep instead of goat, I think I would be completely happy. But as it is, this is still a successful increment, and I'm one hundred confident I'll realize my vision next time!! I'm sure there are more secrets and hacks that I'm missing out on by not taking one of ben elbel's classes, but experimenting and failing myself makes me happier than ANYTHING.
I will say that for someone casually looking for this flexible cover effect... the horizontal hinges are much more for aesthetic than function. The cover is fixed at the spine as it is, so there's simply a limit to how much the cover can move outside that plane. If you're interested in the cover flex more than pixels specifically, I think the italians had it right, and vertical strips of board are the way to go. I'll be trying that out soon as well, but I don't have specific plans just yet. This was a really cool exploration and I'm so, so happy I finally committed to it!
Maedhros wakes up again, on the first morning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
Of course, nobody calls it that. For them, it hasn't happened yet.
Approximately one million years later, here is my project from the yearly Renegade Exchange! Truly, this fic was such a pleasure to work on. I bound this one fandom blind-ish, which is to say that I had the passing familiarity with LOTR that any D&D player / child who read any fantasy she could get her hands on has. I did very much come out of this bind with a new found love for a bunch of dysfunctional elves. Love those guys, and love this incredible fic.
About the Bind
Text Block: 20/50 lb cream short grain
Endpapers: Indian Marbles in Gold/Silver on Black (~125 gsm), prepared as made endpapers
Case Style: three piece in-boards bradel binding, covered with Verona bookcloth in coal
Cover and Titling: foiled using the WRMK foil quill attachment with a Silhouette Portrait 3 and only a medium amount of swearing and threatening the vinyl cutter with bodily harm
Additional typeset pictures, as well as progress pictures and construction / design notes below the cut.
This is, far and away, the most involved bind I've done so far. That means that I have way more to say about it than I usually do, and I also have a few progress pictures (which is rare for me). So, if y'all will indulge me a little:
Typeset
The typeset was pretty standard fair, complete with my ongoing love affair with running footers. I also had a little bit of fun with footnotes on the copyright page.
Finding a good titling font was... involved. I didn't want to just use The Lord Of The Rings Font (TM), and only a few of the LOTR-inspired fonts I found did anything for me. And then, as an additional complicating factor, I had chosen to set the parenthetical portions of the chapter titles as subtitles, and let me tell you: LOTR-inspired fonts have got descenders for days. They are about 60% descenders by volume, which simply doesn't play nicely with subtitles. Got a very lucky break when a fellow binder suggested checking out uncial fonts, and eventually landed on one I really liked. I also broke my own personal rule about not using a different cap for titling vs drop caps, but I wanted something more decorative, and I found a nice uncial style illustrated drop cap that still matched pretty well.
The other design complication for title page and, more importantly, the cover, was the damn Tengwar. Now, I would absolutely describe myself as a nerd. I simply play too many table top games for that to not be true. But what I've never been is a language nerd. The first step (getting the Tengwar transcription) wasn't so hard. I used Tecendil for all of it (and if there are any transcription errors, well... I did my best). But trying to 1) find a Tengwar font that plays nicely with Affinity Publisher and 2) learn how to type correctly in that Tengwar font was.... God. That was a week long endeavor. As it turns out, there is one (1) Tengwar font that Affinity Publisher can render correctly, and that font is Alcarin Tengwar. I'm not going explain why because this post is already going to be long enough as is, but I will at least save the rest of you the trouble of the trial and error that took me.
Covers
For the cover design, I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to do from the beginning, although I did try one alternate version. As usual, all the design work was done in Affinity Designer. (This one also definitely tested my ability to work with my own vectors vs just using other people's vectors.) Regardless, I knew that I wanted to incorporate the idea of "unspooling" or "unraveling." This is a timeloop fix it fic, and I wanted to get that feeling of the new story overwriting the tragedy of the old.
With the importance of Maedhros being able to save Fingon within the story, I keyed in on the moment in The Silmarillion where he dies and foiled those lines in silver:
At last Fingon stood alone with his guard dead about him; and he fought with Gothmog, until another Balrog came behind and cast a thong of fire about him. Thus fell the High King of the Noldor, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood.
Now, the moment I pulled from A Thread Unraveled isn't exactly the same moment, but it is the moment in the fic where I think Fingon is saved for good within the loops:
He deserves to live. He is valiant, and good, and I know that he deserves more than death as his reward. He deserves everything I can give him and more, and he doesn't end here. He cannot end here. Please. See us. See what we have become. I know I have done wrong. I know there is so much I can never make right. I know it. But I am trying. I love him, and I am trying. He loves me, and so I am trying. Is it enough? If you are listening, if you can hear me, please. Have mercy for the Eldar and their love. In the darkness of his mind he sees silver, and blue. The stars as they first emerge in the dusk sky. As Grond reaches the highest point of the swing, Fingon so small on the ground beneath him, Thorondor appears out of the breaking clouds and dives for Morgoth’s face.
And besides, "Have mercy for the Eldar and their love" is a line that really stuck with me after reading the fic. This section is what I foiled onto the cover in gold. High concept design? A bit. But I gotta have fun somehow.
The actual covers were foiled using my Silhouette and a fine tip WRMK foil pen. I messed up two transfers over the course of making three books, but I didn't run out of foil OR bookcloth, so [through gritted teeth] that's fine.
The Text Block
Ah, the text block. Now this is where we started to get a bit fancy with it. After the usual round of glue, rounding, and backing, I started experimenting with some edge decoration techniques. One of my guiding design principles for this bind was the idea of light: this is a story that's preoccupied with finding the light in the darkness in both a philosophical sense and in the very physical "finding a Silmaril" sense. So I had in my head this image of sort of iridescent blue edges. The problem was getting there.
I settled on acrylic inks for my color, mostly because I was scared of accidentally gluing a text block closed with acrylic paint. In general, I have actually really liked working with inks. My method still needs some refinement to eliminate the tendency for inks feather a little into the pages, but they produce incredibly vibrant colors. That said, at least at my local craft store, there weren't any blue metallic inks. And even if there were, that's glittery, not necessarily iridescent. To get myself the rest of the way there, I started playing around with a colorshift acrylic glaze.
IF YOU'D LIKE TO SEE PROGRESS PICTURES FOR THE COLORSHIFT GLAZE, PLEASE CLICK ON THIS IMGUR LINK. TUMBLR KEEPS FLAGGING THESE IMAGES AS EXPLICIT FOR REASONS THAT ARE ABSOLUTELY BEYOND ME.
Now this is a really interesting material that I'm looking forward to experimenting with more. The pictures above are from my test block with the glaze layered over black ink. With all of the edges, I watered the glaze down with some distilled water (mostly due to the aforementioned terror of gluing my text block closed—I still took the block out of the press and fanned it immediately after application). I was reasonably happy with the results, but the problem I consistently ran into is that if you just look at the edges dead on, you don't really get the effect. The light has to hit them just right. (It also makes these edges a pain to try to photograph.) Additionally, this glaze sheds glitter like a motherfucker. I contained the glitter with a coat of watered down acrylic medium, but my success rate with that was variable. Some of the edges turned out great, some of them got a bit cloudy. That might be my stupid glossy acrylic medium at play again, or maybe something else entirely. More experimentation needed.
At any rate, some of them turned out better than others. This is one of the actual text blocks, with the glaze layered over a prussian blue acrylic ink. On the whole, I'm happy with the results, they just aren't quite as eyecatching as I was hoping.
The last new technique I tried out on this bind was handsewn endbands. I've had the materials for a while, but actually figuring out the process intimdiated me for a while, so I'd been putting it off. Turns out that they're actually not too hard to do!
These are faux double core endbands sewn with two strands of embroidery floss held together over a leather core. Lots of little mistakes, especially on my personal copy (which I did first... so that I could make all of my mistakes on it), but very happy with the results.
And that's all I've got to say! I worked on these pretty much non stop for three months, and I'm very proud of them and also very glad they're done. On to the next project!
Prowl was the second born creation of the King. He had always known that he was going to bond to secure an alliance for Praxus.
It was a role that was easier to accept before he had fallen in love with his best friend, a mech he never should have met in the first place.
Fandom: Transformers
Relationship: Jazz/Prowl
Rating: Explicit
Bodice ripper JazzProwl!! Very spicy with a large focus on non-penetrative interface with a plot that snuck in and made me want to kick Sentinel's ass. Need I say anything else to get some more love and attention onto this fic?
Usual spiel about construction and typesetting below with more pics.
I decided to go with a very simple white and blue color scheme, one, because it just felt very classy, and two, because it felt very bride-ish, which is Prowl's role in the story.
Tried out a new material for this bind: Neenah Paper's kivar 7 in the kidskin texture. It's very... interesting to work with? It's almost like a slightly more supple cardstock and fought me while gluing it down. It's definitely very durable though! I was able to wipe off some glue I accidentally got off the cover very easily which give me confidence it should stay that unblemished white for a while to come.
For the endpapers I made paste paper using the pearlescent paint I used for the edges.
There was a bit of a learning curve to using pearlescent paint on the edges of the book. I think maybe the pigment just isn't as fine as it is with my metallic paints because the shimmer would just hop right off if I waited after painting for the edges to completely dry before opening. Instead I had to paint, wait a minute for it to not be completely wet, and then fan the pages open. Worth it though for how pretty the edges look in the light!
The headbands were made by wrapping the cover material around hemp cord.
For typesetting, I used three fonts: Rosarivo for the body, WeddingDay Personal Use for the title page and dropcaps, and Wingdings for the little diamond used for line breaks.
For the chapter openings, I really loved how the fic opened up in Prowl's crystal garden and so I wanted to have some sort of gem/mineral for each opening based off of either it being mentioned in that chapter, vibes, or what the gem allegedly means. I actually made a little list while I was working, but ya know, past Froggie is not always the most coherent so it may not make the most sense. I'll just copy and paste it below. As a bonus it also acts as image credits!
Ch5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hematite_(Cavradi_Gorge,Switzerland)_4.jpg (grounding, protection, stability which prowl needs)
Ch6: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tourmaline%26_aquamarine_J1.jpg (tourmaline found in garden; aqua allegedly calm, centered, relaxed but alert state with balanced energy.
Ch7: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pearl-freshwater_hg.jpg (not a gem, but first chapter with Prowl in Pearlex finish)
Ch9: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dumortierite-quartz_(Brazil)4.jpg (gain insight, jazz gives prowl info on suitors)
Ch10: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jaspe_Orbiculaire_de_Madagascar_1.jpg (malachite can be very toxic if not handled with care. Prime is toxic af here, plus kind of meaty texture is offputting like the end of chapter)
Ch11: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scol%C3%A9cite.jpg (peace and harmony, which prowl needs, but also spiky and a little imposing, like the situation they're in)
Ch12: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labrador(spektrolit)-_Ylamaa,_Finlandia..jpg (lazutherite not a real crystal, so chose a gem with a similar name)
Ch14: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aragonite-_Pantoja,_Toledo,_Castile-La_Mancha,_Spain.jpg (came up when I looked up stones for new beginnings)
Yet another binding of this story by @sticksandsharks. Thank you for the kind permission to bind your work.
Materials used
Case Boards - grey board 1mm
Spine stiffener - cardstock
Covering material - book cloth (green)
Paper onlay - chiyogami paper (paper backed for opacity)
title - gold foil (hot stamped)
Inner book '
Text block - Schleipen fly 05 (115gsm)
Endpapers - chiyogami paper (70gsm)
Endbands - linnen core (10/3) and chiyogami paper
AHH!! im so excited that this project is finally in the author's hands. it was my pleasure to bind @jaebirdpikeri's endlessly fun tsukasen fic craving to touch (with art by the extremely talented @north-sta). this was one of the first tsukasen fics i read in the fandom and ive been drafting (and re-drafting and re-re-drafting) designs since last summer--the author requested a celestial-themed bind and i had to deliver. im so pleased with the results :3
this bind went through a few different iterations--i got almost through the case drafting stage and literally the night before i was planning to start making cutouts in my boards i woke up at like 3AM and completely changed the entire design. it switched everything from a mostly full-cloth bind with a few minor details to a faux three-piece bradel (flatback) with bunch of moving parts, but it was totally worth it in the end.
the is fabric, mulberry, and lokta layered across 20pt, 50pt, and 70pt board with HTV titling and accents. there was a minor issue with the cover titling disappearing into the background but i went over it a second time in white slightly off-center to create a sort of drop shadow effect with the gold and i think it turned out really lovely.
the edges are hand-mixed speckled blue metallic paint and gold calligraphy ink with a 4mm gold silk bookmark, 10k gold clasp, and celestial charm. i sewed 2-thread, single-core medieval style endbands as usual, and the blue thread is a close match to the thread used to sew the textblock together.
the typset for this one was particularly fun. i found a bunch of different starmaps from the 1600-1800s and used them to accent the different chapter pages. there are nine total, each rotated three times across 23 chapters and the title page, showing the both the progression of time and tsukasen's relationship throughout the story. i also included ursa major/minor and orion constellation accents on empty rectos because i felt those were fitting for the characters.
here are a few additional typeset samples! and shoutout as always to my friends for listening to me lament about one thing or another on voicechat or in person--this time mostly about math, haha. until the next one!
I may have forgotten to write a wrap-up of my Binderary projects... Oops. Well, it's not too late to post about one of my most ambitious projects so far.
A friend of mine is a collector, and he has all the volumes of the Forgotten Realms series (and D&D novels in general, which is pretty impressive.) Unfortunately, some of these novels only had a digital release, and one was even only available in an online publication back in the 00s.
We can't have this when we're looking for an actual, complete collection to keep on a bookshelf now, can we?
So my friend approached me, asking whether I'd feel like taking on the project of turning the ebooks he bought into physical book: seven in total. It required a bit of self-evaluation on my side: the project was fun and interesting, but did I have the necessary skills to make it and where did it land with my personal ethics?
This is the perfect example of me refusing to take commissions, but accepting to work on projects for friends. I took it as a personal challenge, as well as the opportunity to hone my skills for the specific type of binding my friend wanted (something rather simple, actually: cased, round spine, half-cloth/half -paper.) He agreed to provide the material, and acknowledged that the bound books would likely be very flawed, since I am by no way a professional.
And this is how I found myself working on seven fantasy books at once.
Overall, everything went surprisingly smoothly, but I'm adding details after the cut.
A little typesetting was required but not much: adding page numbers, since ebooks don't have them; turning the 4 novellas of Cold Steel and Secrets into only one volume; and, since The Falcon and the Wolf had only been published on a website, I took 2 hours to make a decent typeset of it.
The printing was a little tedious (so many pages, and my printer is slow), folding went well BUT I made a terrible mistake when pressing the signature a first time. I split the signatures into different piles, to balance them well in the press. I just forgot that, since the title of the book was not written at the top of the text blocks, I had no way to ensure which signature went to which book.
OOPS.
A bit of reading was required to ensure I was not frankensteining these poor books, but things got sorted without too much pain.
Is there anything more satisfying to look at than nicely sewn, freshly-trimmed, ready-to-round text blocks? I think not.
My friend was incredibly nice with the material he provided and I got to work with beautiful, beautiful marbled paper from Shepherds London.
My photo sucks, but I swear these papers were amazing to work with.
Printing the covers was not as smooth as I would have liked. I had to design the back cover (using either the description of the ebook on the official website, or an abstract chosen arbitrarily) and printed everything with a laser printer. It's deemed to age poorly, as laser-printed covers tend to fade, but... Well, that was part of the deal.
As usual, the pain came with the glueing part, and it's only a me-problem (and possibly an ADHD problem), since I found myself having to VERY QUICKLY unglue-reglue 3 books that I had just cased upside down.
Three out of seven is not so bad, honestly. And there was barely any damage (I just had to repair one spine with colorado bookcloth tape. Just one!) My friend didn't even notice.
One day I'll learn to PAY ATTENTION when casing and I'll NEVER case upside down again.
The last ordeal left was to take somewhat-not-awful photos of the end result (which are the photos at the top of this post, so. I still have a long way to go.)
Then came the nice and fun and satisfying of the books, to be shipped to my friend.
Overall, I'd say it was a great learning experience and a good opportunity to work on something a little different. I will likely never work on seven books AT THE SAME TIME, though. It was a little too much for my poor heart.
(And I will never stop resenting publishing houses who go digital-only except their files are so, so, so badly generated. Why are fanmade typesets better than the official ones, so many times?)
The books have made it to their owner, the family is now complete.
It's hard to express how gratifying it is to see the face of someone whose collection of books means so much to, realising that they might well have the most complete physical collection of Forgotten Realms books in the world.
A two book series - first covers an alternate meeting between Q and Bond, while the second includes the events of Skyfall and ends up as a OT3 with Bond, Q, and 007.
Aesthetics chosen almost entirely because I had papers that coordinated nicely without being identical (which coincidentally also coordinated with my first 00Q book). I’m getting a kick using sewn endpapers and finding thread in my stash to match, so these were sewn with very subtly different colors.
My typesets generally look like they were done by someone tapping away at an ancient linotype machine with how basic they are, and these two books were no exception. Coelacanth for the body font, titles & chapter headings in Imprint MT Shadow, and Miriam Mono for subheadings - all pulled together in LibreOffice Writer.
I actually had to make the textblock for Bound By Contract twice. Somehow when I was sewing I flipped the signatures around halfway through and didn’t notice until the spine had been glued and I was in the process of trimming. I could salvage the endpapers but had to redo everything else. Could have been worse though! It’s just paper and now I have a dead textblock to practice other techniques on.
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.
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.)
I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!
(which you can listen to here on archive.org)
This is my first time doing a buttonhole stitch binding. Most examples I saw were blank notebooks, and had decorative sheets wrapped fully around the outside of each section of paper, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the text, so I just pasted a thin strip of the marbled paper down to the outer fold edge of each section.
This is @rainsfalling's typeset of Mo Du by priest, from 2024's cnovel bookbinding exchange. I love the idea of binding other people's typesets so I can read something for the first time in hard copy, but this is the first time I've done it with a novel rather than with fic (priest's track record is such that I could count on it being worth the effort).
Of course, binding things I haven't read makes for an interesting design challenge. Here is what I knew about Mo Du: police/mystery, there's a cat in this one too, and chapter titles that reference classic literature. So ... I went with the cat, found this paper at a shop in Ithaca, NY last summer, happened to find this plaid fabric on the same shopping trip at a fabric reuse store and thought it paired nicely with the paper, then built the books around that combo.
FINALLY was able to grab a very special package from my parents' place and OH MY GOD I can't believe I'm holding a bound copy of one of my fics!!
@brunheiffer made an absolutely gorgeous bound book of my GOmens fic, so grey the face of every mortal, which is also my only finished multi-chapter fic (to date 😅). This is truly a work of art, it's so gorgeous and there are so many beautiful details in the binding I'm in love. Thank you so much @brunheiffer!!
til solen står op is a 141,4k long carlxassad fic I wrote in 2024 and finished in spring 2025, probably mostly through white-knuckling through burnout (and jobhunting, and quitting my job without having another one lined up, an international move, and more jobhunting, and then starting the new job while recovering from burnout). this fic kept me sane but probably also made me insane.
and then late last year I decided to bind it in a style similar to the other Afdeling Q bindings I've done, both my fic and other's. (can you believe it's been 2 years since I last bound an Afdeling Q fic?? time sure does pass.) so I started typesetting and realised that binding this fic would mean splitting it into two volumes since a single volume A6 would've been too unwieldy and would probably also give me a TBI if I dropped it on my face in bed. it splits after chapter 26 since chapter 26 is the one where they kiss, so a natural breaking point. as it so happens that resulted in two almost equal length volumes - vol 2 is 26 pages and one signature shorter than vol 1.
dustjackets: recycled packing paper of unknown origin salvaged from the recycling bin at my old job
case: bound in duo eruption over 2mm boards. vol 2 has an additional stripe of 116gsm takeo tant select N-57 (yellow) on the front cover, which is a double sided embossed slightly translucent paper consisting of 100% virgin ECF fibre (whatever that means), which I rediscovered in my stash and which is there not as a design choice or to distinguish vol 2 from vol 1, but as a cover up for printer crimes
insides: endpapers are 150gsm daler-rowney canford tangerine and the text is printed on 90gsm munken pure smooth cream
with its brethren. look at it. that's insane.
a few process photos under the cut:
so thicc. I can't believe I managed to get these square. I was worried I'd have to round them, which I didn't want to do because it broke with the squareback hardback aesthetic I had for the other books.
I had to leave my printer behind in London and buy a new one in Copenhagen and the new printer does Not like to print on bookcloth. it kept jamming and ruined the vol 2 cloth by tracking ink all over the jammed part, and while I did manage to put vol 1 through, it wound up so wrinkled I wasn't sure I would be able to smooth that out again. (I did, PVA moisture to the rescue once again. all hail PVA moisture and its ability to erase sins.) jesus fucking christ. also it's hard to tell but just above my bindery logo it does actually say 'del 1' and 'del 2' respectively lmao I was not thinking straight when I decided to print the title in red on red bookcloth. (in my defense it worked really well on dubletta!!)
headbands are from dubletta bookcloth edge cutoffs - when you buy bookcloth like you do fabric i.e. not in precut smaller sheets, it usually comes with a raw fabric edge. I trim it off and then salvage it, and often use it in place of mull on tiny books (like this one). I thought my dubletta yellow orange offcut would be a nice complement to the duo eruption especially because it had that small orange stripe at the edge and so I turned it into fake headbands with a core of glued up macramé - I couldn't be arsed sewing headbands and while my textblocks were very tidy and could've borne being naked, I just thought this would be, well, neat.
as mentioned, the printer fucked up, so I had to do something about vol 2. duo bookcloth has famously been discontinued so I didn't want to scrap it unless I absolutely had to (I only have the one sheet of this colour!!) so I mulled over options (paper inlay? maybe a rising sun with rays?) and discarded them all until I rediscovered the aforementioned takeo tant select paper in my stash. it's slightly translucent so I cut away the janky bit from the front of vol 2, laid down a 20mm strip of 160gsm canaletto cream which seemed to match the thickness of the duo bookcloth and then covered it with a 22mm strip of the yellow takeo tant select. no fancy inlays or whatever, just an off centre stripe down the front cover.
the dustjackets I made for the other volumes, which were normal, slim, volumes, were printed on this recycled paper cut to A4 size to go through the printer, which also left a decent enough amount of flaps for it to work for A6 dustjackets. these chonky bois.... I did consider not doing dustjackets (I mean, why hide away these bright af books??) but I decided I did want to protect them a little, and after poking about a bit I realised my printer supports printing on american paper sizes INCLUDING LEGAL (A4 is 210x297mm whereas legal is 216x356mm), SO:
CHECK IT OUT!!! and yes the creases are intentional - this paper was wrapped around a delivery so that's where the creases are from, and the idea behind these dustjackets for this fandom is to evoke a sense of old and dusty case files. so brown paper, creases, coffee stains.
I trimmed the jackets to be 155mm in height - the board height was 154 but with the bookcloth wrapping around the edges that means a final height of 155m - and wrapped them around the books and LO
I grossly miscalculated the placement of the back cover copy on both jackets LMAO and the neat trick of having a continuous perfect round coffee stain on the lined up spines also didn't quite work out but FUCK IT, I am DONE, I will not bind another book for probably 3 months.
