The O in ABO is for Opera Ghost
Now that the author has received it, I can show off this bind! The Phantom of the Opera is a fandom I enjoy, but I don't check in on it very often. Recently I checked in and found that @kotaka-kun had written a bunch of ABO one-shots and drabbles where Erik is an omega and Christine is an alpha. Which, hello, didn't know I needed THAT in my life but YES PLEASE. Female alpha with male omega? Absolute favorite. Erik who is absolutely worshipful of Christine but still socially awkward? Love it. Possessive Christine going "See this weirdo? This is MY weirdo, no one gets to say bad things about him. No, not even you, Erik" like a boss? The most fabulous. So, anyway, I read all their stories and decided that I really needed a physical copy of these ASAP (and then read them all again for good measure).
In a completely unrelated event in the same week, I was introduced to the dwarsligger format of books, which has its text arranged parallel to the spine so that to read the book, the spine is held horizontal instead of vertical. Like a flip-phone, for us olds.
[ID: A dwarsligger book, held open. It has a top page and a bottom page rather than a left page and right page, as the spine is parallel to the lines of text. The whole thing is about the size of a hand. /End ID]
I thought this format of book would be PERFECT for these stories, as they gave me very "it's not like other people do it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong" vibes, which I feel this format of book reflects perfectly. New, different, maybe a little unnerving, but also a little intriguing at the same time.
I format my textblocks in MS Word, and it was tricky to arrange things into a "top" and "bottom" instead of the more regular verso and recto (left and right), but the WORST part was getting the page numbers to work correctly. Because the page numbers are only displayed on the bottom pages but Word has the top and the bottom as different pages, it wanted to put the page numbers as 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. I had to go digging real deep in the MS Word niche features to figure it out. I ended up finding the information I needed on a nearly-20-year-old blog that kept referring to Word 2007 as "new Word". Whenever you need really precise, niche information, it's always on a 20-year-old blog, they're the best source of knowledge. If anyone's curious, I ended up having to do some math in the page number field codes so the displayed page number was always half of the actual page number + 1 (using integer division). So 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. became 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Unfortunately the Table of Contents field codes are a black box and don't let you edit the internals, so I had to generate the table of contents (which displayed the actual page numbers instead of the displayed page numbers) and then edit all the numbers myself.
On the bright side, this format and size of book (it's an octavo, so one-eighth of a letter-size sheet of paper) is PERFECT for a drabble collection. A title, plus 100 words, plus a page number, exactly fits on one top-and-bottom spread.
I of course made myself a copy as well as an author copy. However, there were...issues.
[ID: A black and brown copy of the same book lying on a cutting mat, front covers up. They're both titled "The O in ABO stands for Opera Ghost" with the text arranged parallel to the spine, but the brown copy is noticeably narrower and the title barely fits on the cover. /End ID]
When I trimmed my copy, I measured wrong (or rather, measured right but in the wrong place) and trimmed the right side twice. Luckily I had left large enough margins that I didn't trim off any text. I'll just trim the left side by the same amount and I'll just have tiny margins on my copy, no problem, right? Wrong. I immediately proceeded to cut off all my kettle stitches on the left side.
[ID: A hand holding a dwarsligger book open with a thumb under the stitching in the middle of a signature, showing that the knots securing the stitching have been completely cut off on the left side. /End ID]
Luckily the stitching is secured at three other points and I glued the spine well, but it was still a face-palm moment.
Technical details:
Size: Letter-octavo dwarsligger
No headbands on this one (intended to, forgot until I glued the oxford hollow on, at which point it was too late)
Rounded but not backed
Chisel-trimmed
Things I especially liked about this bind:
The format! So weird, so delightful
Things I would improve next time:
Not cutting my stitching off, ideally.
Overall, I love the stories and like the bind. (I also read all the stories through again once I had the finished bind in my hands. Still loved them.) It works, it's functional, it would have been better if I hadn't trimmed my copy way too narrow, but live and learn and it still works so it's fine.
