#fanbinding resources

[deisderiumbooks]

Hello! Not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, but do you have any tutorials or tips for Fan binding? I find it fascinating and wanted to know if it's unobtainable unless you have specialist equipment. Your stuff is beautiful, and I wondered how you got it to look so professional.

Hello there! First of all, thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate it.

Thanks as well for asking this. it is not at all unobtainable without specialist equipment (although of course, that can help!) My "press" is two cutting boards and some clamps, and that works for me.

Bookbinding is definitely a hobby that you can get as simple or as complicated as you want. I started making pamphlets and went from there (and I am now in year 3 of this hobby, so some of what you are seeing is just practice! I can look at my first books and see how far I've come, which is great.)

I find it very rewarding to turn fics I love into physical books and lavish them with love and attention to detail. If you are interested in fanbinds, my first go-to suggestion is to check out the Renegade Guild of fanbinders. They have a ton of resources and a very active discord server with people who are very generous with their knowledge. Also I found ArmoredSuperHeavy's fanbinding guide to be enormously useful to start with.

There are some great YouTube bookbinders out there as well. I found DAS Bookbinding, bittermelonbindery, and off youtube, PapercraftPanda to be very helpful. Of course, there are loads more! But these are some that I found very helpful, especially at the beginning.

One thing a lot of binders use is machines like a Cricut or other vinyl cutting machine, and if that is something that interests you, see if your local library has one in their makerspace. Mine did, and it was a great way to see if that was something I wanted to invest in further down the line.

I hope any of this is helpful! If you have any other questions, please let me know. My top takeaway would be check out Renegade, because that will connect you with so many other resources! Bookbinding really is six dozen hobbies in a trenchcoat, and it is so much fun.

[mpchev]

Update on fanbinding dissertation: all the things I did (endpapers, glue, spine, boards) while in fear of the things to come (casing, mostly)

The missing supplies have finally arrived! Now the only thing keeping me from the terrifying steps of making the covers and casing the books is my own cowardice!

Started by making endpapers out of sketchbook pages, with my dear friend the borrowed guillotine (now on my bedroom floor, much less glamorous than the sunlit uni library). Folded them and glued them to the sewn textblocks.

I followed this youtube video for glueing the spine, and later this one for cutting the boards for the covers, both from Annesi Bindings. Started by cutting the mull muslin to size, and then came the wonderful macgyvering of the book press! I disassembled this laptop stand from ikea (which was also the perfect height when sewing the signatures together), pushed the two shelves together, secured them with shoelaces tensioned with pencils, and laughed for a good 30min at how surprisingly okay the whole set up was. Squeezed the textblocks in there and used PVA glue + a cheap paint brush from Lidl to apply the muslin strips.

Left that to dry for a bit while I was cutting the boards, officially the first step I am not a fan of. Since the books are tiny and the spines won’t be rounded, I also cut support for the spines out of millboard. Then tried to glue the boards to a piece of paper to check measurements around the textblocks, made a bunch of mistakes, realised it was 1am, undid the mistakes and went to bed.

Coming up next: sewing on the headbands (sounds like friendship bracelets, looking forward to it!) and casing the books (sounds like carpentry, the stuff of nightmares!)

[mpchev]

For typesetting fanfiction on Word, I highly recommend Blak Books Bindery's macros: https://blakbooks.wixsite.com/blak-books-bindery

It really speeds up the process! But it only works for fics posted on Ao3.

Thank you so much for the rec! Sadly won't be able to use it — I did get the fics I'm binding from ao3, but i'm a silly goose using LibreOffice instead of Word. But the typesetting is (hopefully) finished, so all is good now. 😌

[mpchev]

Update on fanbinding dissertation: typesetting and print test!

The fics have been picked (from ao3), the author has been contacted (on tumblr), the typeset is almost done (in libreoffice, following along some gdocs shared on the @renegadeguild discord) — call me a romantic, but the amount of fan-created tools and online community spaces is making me emotional.

Here are the thoughts (could almost call them fieldnotes, look at me go):

I really enjoyed the typesetting! I kept pulling out traditionally published books from my shelf to measure margins, compare font sizes, check out page layouts. Had one technical issue, asked about it on the Renegade Bindery’s Discord, had a solution twelve minutes later. <3

I then created a SFW version, just one-signature long, for print test purposes. Changing the text was mostly to avoid sending and e-rated fic to the wrong university printer while I was figuring out how to use the printing queue, but I’m so glad I now have a physical thing to show to people without content warnings.

As it was bound to happen (bound, hehe), pages were printed all wrong, so I spent an hour trying to figure out if it was the imposition tool or the printer who hated me (turns out the printer check box ‘flip on short edge’ is a very important check box), but finally got it! Big shout out to the department’s guillotine, my new best friend.

Brought everything home, created a punching guide out of an old postcard, punched the pages with dollar store needles (was debating getting an awl, will be getting an awl) on top of an old notebook (can’t go damaging student accommodation furniture now can we), and sewed it up with embroidery floss (which I unravelled to use fewer strands). I plan on getting actual supplies for the non-lorem-ipsum book, but very happy with the test signatures!

So. Typesetting and sewing: very very fun. Imposing: also fun, like a 24-piece 3D puzzle. Printers: the one bit of technology I might never truly understand.

Next up, actually finishing the typeset, getting those supplies, and, in true fandom fashion, printing smut at school.