Bookbinding Process (1/2): The Wolf Queen, from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I have a very exciting comission— I’m binding The Wolf Queen, an in-game novel from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I’ve never played the game, but my client told me they enjoy collecting and reading the books in the game. According to the Elder Scrolls wiki, there are apparently 820 of them! I’m binding the one of the longer stories, which is actually broken up into 8 volumes.
In researching, it seems that the volumes seem to take on completely different binding styles, but we agreed on the style shown here. We also decided to condense these volumes into 1 book— the entire story is only about 12k words, and while the handwritten large text works well for reading the story on a small in-game window on your monitor, it’s not really practical for a physical book. That, and even if I were to print these true to size for the game, each volume would still be about 40 pages, which only equates to 10 sheets of folded paper, so it wouldn’t make for a very robust collection on the shelf.
You can see that these books in this game are actually quite weathered, and it seems like all the paper is unevenly torn. If we were to equate Skyrim’s time period with our own based on technology, it’s likely these pages would have been parchment. The in-game textures definitely support this, even for the bindings that seem to be a few centuries ahead of their time.
We agreed that antiqued cotton paper would be a suitable alternative, as enough parchment for this project would run a couple thousand dollars as-is, and I don’t believe I have the equipment necessary to print on it. I needed something with a quick turnaround for this project, so I went with this paper in the ‘Vintage Deckle’ finish in the A4 size. According to one review, it’s also short-grained, so it’s actually ideal for bookbinding.
Typesetting
I’m using Adobe InDesign to typeset this, but it can also be done with Word and other alternatives.
Here’s a guide by ArmoredSuperHeavy on tumblr.
I think Bethesda owns the font used in the Elder Scrolls games, but there is a dupe of it on dafont.com called Cyrodiil. However, it definitely feels and reads more as a modern font; it was designed with readability after all. I’m definitely going for something that feels like a Celtic manuscript, based both on the decorative Celtic knot tooling, and the Gaelic look of the font. I eventually found Kelmscott, which carries the same Gaelic characteristics as Cyrodiil, and is still relatively easy to read, but feels more calligraphic.
I also downloaded Medieval Victoriana for the decorative first letters of each chapter.
To typeset the text, I followed a tutorial article by Grace Fussell and Adobe’s guide for creating book files.
I wanted the text to look dense and almost glyphic, as many old medieval manuscripts do, while still being easy enough to read. I played around with the paragraph tools and eventually settled on this layout. While certainly not all manuscripts have multiple columns, I want this typesetting to really break the boundaries seen in most modern prints of books, so I decided on this two-column format. Some manuscripts keep the text frame smaller and in the center of the page, much like you see in later centuries when the printing area was restricted by a press, but once again, I want to emphasize the look of ‘handwritten’ manuscript, so I made sure to use wide margins.
Some other fun details I added were glyphs at the beginning of each chapter, and surrounding the page numbers.
I exported the file for print with InDesign’s ‘Print Booklet’ feature, with the 2-up perfect bound with a signature size of 8 (2 pieces of paper/4 spreads/8 text pages).
Text Block
Here’s the printed and folded signatures! I’m really pleased with how these came out— it has the exact weathered look I was trying to emulate from in-game. As an added bonus, since the source material wasn’t particularly long, the thickness of the paper (150gsm) gave the text block a good amount of volume.
Out of lack of good online reference, my client ended up sending me photos of the book in-game. I was excited to realize this book seems to be bound on cords or leather straps— kind of difficult to tell from the model. We decided to go with a slit leather strap.
I couldn’t find a great reference image of the stitch for this, but I used the same technique of punching and sewing my signatures as this double cord instructional from The Thames and Hudson Manual of Book Binding.
Endpaper
I definitely wanted to go for a more traditional endpaper, so I looked at what I had in my stash of marbled paper. I was initially drawn to this Renato Crepaldi peackock marble I got from Hollander’s, which has a beautiful red that screams “medieval” to me, but Skyrim is a cold place, so I was also drawn to go for this blizzard-esque marble. Though, I ultimately decided on this dark blue/indigo paper I got from the Paper Source.
I went for the indigo because the protagonist of this novel I’m binding, Potema Septim, the Wolf Queen herself, is associated with the color purple. Since the goal of this binding was to recreate an in-game item as it would be in-game, a bookbinder in Skyrim would also most likely want to make design choices reflecting the contents of this specific book. Or maybe they’d be illiterate and just go for the red. Either way, my client also liked the dark indigo, so that’s what we went with.
This endpaper is the cover weight of De Milo Design’s line of paper called Sustain & Heal. It’s fair trade, handmade in Bangladesh, from jute fibers.
It also has deckled edges, so I made sure to align my cuts to use that, and I tore the rest by hand to keep the natural edges consistent. This is a bit of an unconventional aesthetic choice, but it stemmed from that it’d be odd if the fly leafs were straight cut with the rest of the text block so extremely deckled.
Headbands
Keeping with the purple/indigo/blue theme, I made two-colored headbands around jute cord with DCM embroidery floss in colors 31 and 796. I basically used the technique outlined here. In retrospect though I’d recommend doing a big double endband or something bulky with this paper, since the deckled edges tend to push the endband back towards the spine and hide it.
Bookbinding Process (2/2): The Wolf Queen, from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Leather Covering
I consulted pretty closely with my client on selecting a leather for this book, as I don’t maintain a stock of full hides, and instead exclusively buy industry remnants. I had some pieces that I could have patched together very nicely for the cover, but my client wasn’t a fan of the tone of the leathers. We almost decided on me buying a hide, but I ended up finding this chocolate brown nubuck from my stash.
For those unfamiliar (via bestleather.org):
WHAT IS NUBUCK LEATHER?
Ever gone to a shop to buy a pair of shoes and wondered about the difference between nubuck and suede? Don’t worry, soon you’ll know where nubuck comes from, what it’s used for and how to care for it.
Nubuck has a feel similar to suede but it’s more durable since it comes from the top grain of the hide. It has a great look and feel and is used for a wide variety of products. It brings together some of the finer qualities among the various kinds of leather.
To make nubuck leather, the outer (top-grain) layer of calfskin or cowhide is used. The top-grain layer is tougher and more resilient than the inner layer, which is used to make suede. However, because it may have visible markings and defects, the top grain is sanded and buffed on the outside to provide a consistent appearance. The sanding process leaves a slight nap of short protein fibers, giving a velvet-like finish to the leather. In order to hide any defects remaining in the nubuck surface, it is stained or dyed.
It’s certainly an unconventional pick for a book, but since nubuck has a delicate, buffed surface, it’ll actually be able to pick up an aged patina much faster than most other leather finishes. The book feels very luxurious with this leather, I’m sure it’ll age gorgeously too.
Here, I glued the leather directly to the spine, defined the raised bands, and tied it down.
The spine looked absolutely beautiful after untying it! I went ahead and glued the remainder to the boards.
Tooling
I’m applying gilding with the We R Memory Keepers Foil Quill. At the time of purchase, there was a cheaper deal for the Standard Tip even though I wanted the Fine, so I just filed down the tip until I was happy with it. They’re quite overpriced for what they are though, I’d recommend buying an unbranded version with interchangable tips from AliExpress or the like if you can.
I ultimately couldn’t find a great reference for the Celtic knot-style pattern on the game model, so we decided to go with a freehanded border design in a similar fashion.
The model design seems to feature a variation of the trinity knot/triquetra, but as if they’re all strung along a continous rope. After a few attempts to trace over the design in Photoshop to try to figure out the logic, it ultimately seemed like the best bet was to clean this texture up for a real-life recreation.
This was pretty straightforward, just time consuming. I tried to plot approximately where each ‘triangle’ would go with small dots before starting each border edge, to make sure I’d be fitting it in nicely, and added random breaks or continuations of a “rope” connecting the triquetra.
I also gilded the perimeter of the boards with a simple stripe as an aesthetic touch:
The final tooling challenge here is the spine, which appears to be stamped, in a completely different style than the hand-tooled borders. We decided to change this to hand-tooling the vine and swirl motifs freehand for a more cohesive design. In my research though, I considered using the techniques outlined by Ingenius Designs to achieve this with leather stamps instead, it’s a great resource.
We also decided to incorporate type for the title in a Gaelic-style script and the Skyrim logo on the spine. As I don’t have stamps for either of these, I’m using a laser printer to make these designs. Using the technique from this video, I made negatives of the foil designs I want and printed them out on a laser printer.
I first made a template for sizing with a cut Post-it note and a sketch of the intended design. The space between my raised bands was 30x28mm, so I created boxes of that size for my design in Photoshop. This needs to be printed from a laser printer, not an inkjet, because they use toner. Printer toner will become adhesive at a lower temperature than heat foil sheets require for normal transfer, but will still grip to the foil.
This means I can heat transfer foil onto my toner negative at a low enough temp that my positive graphic won’t transfer with the absence of toner. The foil adheres to the toner on the paper, leaving me with foil with only my design remaining!
My toner prints were pretty spotty so my results were not great, but I’d nonetheless recommend printing a few copies of your negatives so you can pick out the best ones. In my case, I struggled to get “THE” to transfer from one sheet, so I ended up using it from another piece as well.
I don’t have a laminator or anything fancy, so I just used my iron. I tried a couple techniques, on and off the ironing board, with wax paper, etc.
For me, here’s what worked best:
iron on rayon setting (heat level 3/7 for my specific iron), you don’t want steam
iron directly onto the foil
place a smooth flat surface (I used chipboard) ontop of ironing board so you can achieve a good press
iron over the foil in a couple different directions
Of course, make sure to print some practice negatives to figure out what works for you if you use a similar technique
You can see that a lot of foil didn’t transfer onto the toner, so I cleaned these up with a hot foil pen on scrap paper.
With this, I can just transfer the design by completely tracing it over with my hot foil pen.
After I got the label type and Skyrim logo transfered, I marked where they were by placing scrap negatives over foil cut for the space and outlining the border of the design.
You can kind of see where I outlined and scratched away at where my transfers are on the 2nd and 6th spaces
From there, I freehanded the spine tooling based on the game model:
Let me just start this off with that from my 7 years of experience bookbinding, a LOT went wrong with this project. Like, almost everything that could've went wrong. It is not to my usual standard of work, though I tried to make up for errors where I could.
Nonetheless, I'm doing this for practice and to document my progress, so here's how it went!
⍔ (More final pics at the end) ⍔
I absolutely adore the cover of the first volume as-is. It's really great graphically: the palette pops and gives a clear hierarchy to information in different areas, the illustration of Gon on the frog is super cute, it's overall just fun.
My first design decision was to retain the green/yellow/red color palette. I don't think I've ever done anything with these colors, I don't really gravitate towards them, so I definitely wanted to keep them in the design.
I didn't have a piece of leather large enough in any of these colors-- all the leather I use is industry scraps and remnants, so I don't really purchase full hides. So, I had to get creative with it:
I did have enough of this laurel green leather to cover a front and back board, but I'd need to hide the seam along the spine. I also have this really cool tie silk jacquard, I want to guess it's from the 80's (I got it for a dollar at a flea market). Technically I'm using the backside of this stuff, but I like it better because of how vibrant the colors are. I only need a thin strip for the spine, so I cut out a matching green, yellow, and orange section.
Here are some reject cover material contenders: different leathers, vintage kimono silk, and snakeskin!
I didn't want to just copy the cover for the board design, so I looked at the panels for some inspiration. My favorite panel from volume 1 is actually of the tunnel from the Hunter exam (left), but since this is the first volume, I really wanted to pay homage to this being the beginning of Gon's journey. So, I included this panel of Whale Island (right), along with a wave pattern.
Here's the design I sketched out, and it carved into chipboard:
Normally I'd just sketch directly onto the chipboard I'm carving, but I wanted to have a template to use for gold foiling. This is my first attempt at doing so; I don't actually have the proper tools for traditional hot stamping, so I'm using a hot foil pen (video on the tool/technique).
First mistake: Trying to brute force the original cover off the block.
Lesson: Use a heat gun.
Removing the text block from the original softcover was pretty straightforward, except I originally tried to get the cover off the block by gentle tearing/cutting away at the original glue, which resulted in me just destroying the attached page anyway. This volume doesn't give you many "junk" pages to sacrifice, so it meant I'd have to glue my end paper onto the last page of the volume D:
For the other cover, I hit it with a heat gun for a few seconds, and it peeled right off.
Here's a progress shot of attaching the leather to the boards, smooth sailing there:
Second mistake: Not backing fabric with Heat n' Bond
Lesson: Always make bookcloth properly
I have made my own bookcloth before (video on how to do it), and really, truly, know better than to apply liquid glue to fabric. Nonetheless, I was stupid and did it anyway. I even diluted the glue with water, thinking that would mitigate the effects of glue seepage? It didn't. My spine fabric lost all its vibrancy and was just an ugly, goopy mess.
Before I attached the board and spine to the block and endpapers, I added the foiling. At first, that came out pretty well, but then I lost patience, and started freehanding Whale Island on the back.
Third mistake: Not sticking to the template
Lesson: Stick to the fucking template (and start saving for a CNC)
The drawing itself was fine, so normally this wouldn't be an issue, but because I have Whale Island sitting on top of a raised embossed silhouette, it was painfully obvious that my drawing wasn't in the position or scale it was supposed to be. My freehand lettering also leaves something to be desired, though I don't think the template would have helped a lot with this either. Honestly, for a position-sensitive blind transfer for lettering like this, using a CNC like a Cricut or Silhouette would be best. This might be my push to finally invest in one?
The endpapers are actually paper I had marbled myself, a while back, and met the green/yellow criteria. Attaching those to the block went smoothly, though I had to slightly glue over the panels at the back of the volume T^T... I used some of the spine fabric for head/endbands as well. It's... pretty ugly up close. Glue seepage, and the next mistake.
Fourth mistake: Gluing the entire fucking block upside down
Lesson: Anything but that
The cosmetic mistakes on the cover this book are pretty forgivable, but the inside is a genuinely disgusting mess. I was working on getting this done before a friend came over, and was pretty happy to get the block glued in and the whole thing in the press before she arrived. I decided to take it out of the press show her when she arrived, only to realize I HAD GLUED THE BLOCK UPSIDE DOWN. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I tried to remove the block nicely, but the glue was already half dry and tacky and it was an awful awful mess, and I was already SO DONE with the project. So, I just cut the block out along the middle of the endpaper, and stepped away for the evening.
I really wanted to use the marbled paper I made, and I had no scraps to use over the seam where I had to flip the block, so I had to find a complimentary alternative. I just used some chiyogami, with, once again, green/yellow/red. Slapped that on the seam. Probably could've done a better job with it.
I had been saving the original covers, and wanted to incorporate them, so I decided to use them as sort of bookmark pages? Not sure how to call it, but like how hardcovers with a paper cover will have those folded flaps on the inside usually with an about or review section.
As for the cosmetic fixes:
First thing I did was properly make bookcloth with the sliver of extra silk in the right colorway that I had, and glued that over the lumpy fucked up original spine. It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely a lot better.
When I started writing this, I had only done gold foil on the covers. But as I was looking back at early design process photos, I remember how much I wanted to incorporate the red into the design, which mine was absent of. So, I started to accent Gon and the frog with red paint.
It looked absolutely horrifying.
So I kept painting, and painting, and painting, trying to make it look good, and it was 4AM and I was tired, and I'm used to oil paint so I forgot you can't just leave ugly globs of paint wherever and wipe them up later, and it just kept looking worse and worse.
I got jumpscared by this monstrosity this morning:
Don't paint while tired!!
I tried to salvage my awful paint job the next day, and kept adding more colors and paint into the design until I had ended up just repainting the original cover. I didn't get the lettering perfect or anything, but I got it to a presentable point at least. I really wanted to make some semblance of a re-interpretation of the original illustration, but oh well, the painted version was a necessary fix.
It's not perfect by any means, (honestly, it's not even good either), but I did what I could, and I'm ready to move onto the next project. Here's the final pictures!
Thank you for reading this far! Please leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions, they really encourage me to keep going :D
