#book collection

[macrolit]

Personal library of Richard A. Macksey, retired professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

[madeleineengland]

"Wuthering Heights" illustrated by Isabella Mazzanti for the french collection Papillon Noir Gallimard 📚

[gillisiart]

Painted a collection of Jane Austen novels!

Clockwise from top left: Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Sense & Sensibility, Persuasion

[aponii1]

Books and cats.

[kitsch-habit]

Some recent and recentish additions to my lesbian book library! I used to have far more rare books including The Persistent Desire, but alas my house burned down a little over a year ago so i’m starting my book collection from scratch 😭

I mostly find my books at second hand stores, or on ebay and thrift books, i look often and very religiously because you can sometimes find rare books listed for cheap if you are quick about it. But since I don’t live in the US it can be hard to find certain titles if they’re in USD because the conversion rate is so bad, plus international shipping costs are crazy.

[erratum-paginae]

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?)

AND WITH THIS, BINDERARY IS A WRAP!

[godzilla-reads]

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekhov