so about a year and a half ago my partner got on a nostalgia kick for Jak & Daxter, and i - having lived under a rock growing up - had never actually heard of it before! the conversation very quickly evolved from "well, it's a lot more fun to play than to watch being played," to "there are a lot of elements that it touched on that it never really explored as in-depth as it could have," to "you know what, if i'm gonna introduce you to one of my favorite games, i'm gonna do it with STYLE," and they ultimately ended up spending the next sixteen months writing me a complete bespoke novelization of the first game on discord one message at a time XD
(i love them so god damn much. i'm already planning to bind their currently-ongoing J&D 2 writeup.)
anyway, i'd always meant to get into bookbinding and this seemed like the perfect place to start - never mind that the formatted document was 160k+ and 500 pages long, go big or go home, right?
i emerge from my extended hours in "baby otter convinced it's dying when put in water before it realizes it was built for swimming" crafting skill-tree purgatory to show you: my first-ever bookbinding project!
i got the cover paper, endpapers, spine & corner leather, davy boards, and embroidery floss for sewing up the signatures from michaels. the text block was printed on 24-lb, 50% recycled 96 bright copy paper from staples. i made my own book press out of two cutting boards and some assorted hardware, and a bit of research into leather paring led me to this blog post by a professional book conservator, who recommended razor planes for small-scale leather paring as a step below an actual spokeshave - i found one for $20 on ebay and it turns out it works PERFECTLY, strongly recommend. i used a combination of @armoredsuperheavy's how-to document and DAS Bookbinding's round-backed bradel binding and half-leather library binding tutorials for the case.
i formatted the text block in google docs, using Epilogue for the body text and Shadows Into Light for the headers. i used the in-game Precursor script for the covers, spine, and foretitle, done by screenshotting individual letters from a translation chart and assembling them in MS Paint, and the splash title features a nice series logo vector i yoinked from its wikipedia page. i used this tool for doing the signature layout. i did have to do quite a bit more line-editing than is probably normal for fanbinding since i was taking it from a raw discord copy-paste to a Formatted Novel(TM), but my partner gave it the okay and it did give me the chance to come up with some fun chapter title names XD
using sealemon's text block sewing tutorial let me colorcode the binding thread to which portion of the elemental powerup progression of the game was being covered, with the added bonus of adding an extra little pop of color to go along with the concept art portraits, character model/gameplay screenshots, and a few of their own original illustrations my partner included while they were writing! i ended up just doing a buttonhole stitch in black for the endbands, since i didn't have any pre-made ones on hand.
i don't have a cricut and i don't know how to do the fancy heat-transfer vinyl thing, so i just had to make do with a 9 mm olfa knife and several hours' worth of patience for the cover text XD
what ended up working really well was to lay strips of delicate-surface painter's tape onto a sheet of printer paper, print the assembled strings of text onto the tape, and cut out the lettering to make a custom sticky stencil! put it on the book where you want it, pat it down really good, and fill it in with a couple coats from a fine-tip Posca paint pen. peel it gently back up, and boom - beautifully crisp painted lettering! :D
(in case anyone's curious, the spine/front cover/foretitle say "JAK AND DAXTER", the front cover additionally has "SQUID" as the author name at the bottom-right corner, and the back cover says "IF YOU CAN READ THIS", "YOU'RE A NERD", and "I LOVE YOU". the game devs apparently included all KINDS of easter eggs in the in-game text that people have translated over the years, i couldn't NOT, lmao)
vaporwave
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
