#first bind

[mei-bound]

First finished binds, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Of course looking at them I can't help but see all the mistakes I made; spines collapsed, book blocks were trimmed crookedly, endpapers shifted, the print-out, the thickness of the boards, et cetera. That means I learned an awful lot, though! The next text blocks will be better. And like one of the wise book people said, first there was no book, and now there is book, legible and not falling apart. So, Success!

The Austens are going to be my Fuck Around and Find Out binds, so I threw everything at them and tried to make something stick. So many firsts! First time making my own book cloth, following this tutorial. First time trying made endpapers, as per DAS. First time testing how that edge decoration shtick works, hell. I looooooove the beautiful edge decorations on commercial binds, I wanna get there! But my book plough work still needs practice, and I got self-conscious about sanding the edges on my balcony, so the result is rather predictably poor.

Pleasant surprise was the bradel binding! Took me long enough to understand what a bradel binding is (connecting the spine board and the front and back boards with a piece of paper before you cover the whole thing with cloth or paper), but once I got it, I loved it. It sounded so complicated when I read up on it, but it actually made the whole casing in process more predictable and less anxiety-inducing.

I screwed up the first cover for Pride and Prejudice, left the front and back cover too long. They stuck out almost a centimeter beyond the text block, it felt so wrong! So I made a second one.

The cover decoration was just the title cut with my Silhouette on some heat transfer vinyl.

Next up, either the next few Austens (I am ogling Emma, because I love her; ultimately I want to bind all seven novels and have them sitting next to each other on my shelf like little jewels!), or a fan-bind for a friend. Geronimo!

[justheblueberry]

first bind!

i never posted it before, but it's good to have a marker of where i started 💜

paper was regular copy paper, sewn with embroidery thread, boards scavenged from an old sketchbook and endpapers excruciatingly cut with the sharp corner of a metal ruler and an ultra janky exacto knife, "mull" not shown because it was bright pink sparkly tulle. lol

the bookcloth is homemade from this strangely wrinkly and textured cotton fabric, and the endpapers are a rolled up and glued piece of paper. all held together with mod podge! hand-painted the title with golden acrylic.

i didn't think id ever post this one, but it's nice to look back and see how far ive come since november of 2021, even though im quite embarrassed by the state of it. still, it's the bind that has gotten the most use (and reuse); ive annotated it over and over again from each reread and now its full of tabs. still works as a book, so no matter how janky it is, it has lasted as a functional readable object!

[binding-amaris]

My first completed ficbind!

I wanted to do something on the smaller side and I am really glad I did. Overall I think this came out alright for my very first attempt but I did learn a lot through this process and will do even better next time!

I bound Police Dog by surveycorpsjean which is a Kyoutani Kentaro/Yahaba Shigeru dog shifter fic. It won't be everyone's cup of tea due to the cop au and shifter tag but I love this story so much!

Fic: Police Dog by surveycorpsjean

Cover: @/kuckoonut (has since deactivated)

Back Cover: @pofusoup

Typeset: meeeeee!!!!

[snek-panini]

Got a bit of a different bookbinding post today. @renegadeguild got an ask from a new binder saying they were intimidated by everyone's gorgeous binds (me too, actually, some of you guys are scary good), and so they've asked people to share their first binds. And I realized I'd never even taken photos of my first one, so here it is, warts and all:

This is E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, a public domain scifi short story that you can read for free at the link. The first reason I chose it was that it's an interesting story, and I'd bought a print-on-demand copy a few years previously that was just terrible. Baffling cover choices, basic errors in the typeset (like quotes that face the wrong way), weird size that didn't fit on my shelf; just not a good product. I couldn't do it with more indifference than the PoD people. The second reason was that I was too intimidated by the thought of asking a fic writer if I could bind their story and then producing something with a thousand sloppy beginner mistakes, and then they'd want to see photos and I'd have to show them this and it would have been mortifying, but Forster has been dead since 1970 so I could not disappoint him. It was very freeing. I bound it in 2021 as an experiment, to see if I liked this hobby enough to stick to it. The cover is green cardstock and faux leather scrapbook paper that I bought at... probably Hobby Lobby. I added the title later, as a practice project when I first got my Cricut; for the first two years of its existence it had a blank cover.

There are more photos under the cut!

In this photo we can see:

--Too much glue when attaching the leather-print paper, so it oozed out onto the cover.

--Cricut font too thin and too much heat/too long of a press, so the letters have gaps and the glue also oozed out here. It's a continuing theme with this bind.

--I tried to use a bone folder to give it a sharper hinge crease and accidentally pressed too hard and tore a hole in the paper; you can see this in the little white vertical line near the top of the hinge

The fore edge is not square. I actually don't remember why this happened. I may have eyeballed the board position when I made the case, or the paper may have slipped while the glue was wet, or I cut it crooked and didn't notice till later. Either way it's bad enough that the book doesn't stand on its own. There was a crooked man/who walked a crooked mile/and found a crooked sixpence/against a crooked stile./He bought a crooked cat/which caught a crooked mouse/and they all loved together in a little crooked house, and I bet they read this little crooked book from their little crooked library.

Top view, you can see that the case is too big and the text block doesn't sit straight in it. It has no endbands or bookmark, and it's hard to see in this photo but there's glue on the top of it, at the spine. This still happens to me but I know how to trim books now so this bit gets cut off. You can also see that the scrapbook paper has some cracks where its white core is visible. This is why I do cloth or actual faux leather on the spines now. Endpaper shows uneven trim (did I not use a ruler for this??), too much glue causing major seepage, and it doesn't sit evenly in the case. I'm not sure if this is because of the case itself being crooked, a badly-trimmed endpaper, or if the text block is also crooked. Or it may be a combination of all these factors. Unclear.

Typeset photos! Here we see:

--Title page has a page number on it. This is a pet peeve of mine and I fixed it after this book.

--There is no half title, summary, or metadata. All my later binds have these things.

--It's typeset in Times New Roman. Unlike many I don't actually hate this font but reading it reminds me of being in high school so this is the only book I used it for. Baskerville is my beloved now. The font is also much bigger than it should be. It's not huge but it's like a large print book so it feels weird for me to read it.

--Lol what are margins

--Lol what are page headers

--Actually I think I left the headers out so it wouldn't have a header on the first page of each chapter, because I knew about page breaks but not section breaks at this time.

--It's on regular-ass lightweight printer paper. There's nothing wrong with this but I switched to heavier weight paper shortly after to help with bleed-through and the light stuff feels so flimsy now.

--I didn't understand how Word's book fold worked at this time, so when I had to set the sheets per booklet and it had an option for 4, I chose that thinking it would give me 4 sheets of paper (16 numbered pages) per sig. It did not do this. It gave me 4 numbered pages per sig. So every signature is 1 sheet of paper. Every page is its own signature. I am still mad about this but it sure drove home how the setting works and also how to make kettle stitches since you make one after every sig. A book of 48 pages has 12 signatures which is just ludicrous.

--There's no photo of this but it has a piece of printer paper on the spine because I didn't have mull. I did use PVA though. Lots and lots of PVA.

--It's stitched with regular sewing thread, which means it doesn't have much swell for a book with that many sigs, but it's less sturdy and more likely to tear the paper.

And that's that! It probably sounds a bit like I was tearing it to shreds but I actually love this book quite a lot. I learned so many things that I applied to my next binds, it was an invaluable experience. It let me fall in love with the hobby so I could make the awesome things I make now. I've got those all posted on my main blog under the tag #snek makes books, or you can see them all on my side blog @papersnakepress. For a first book it's functional and readable, and still better than the PoD copy I had before. I've been thinking of doing a rebind as a sort of progress gauge, actually. Maybe next year.

[cardsnwords]

A little bit after my first fanbind, I bound another great fanfic. Linger in the Sun by the wonderful etymologyplayground ( @megafaunatic on tumblr).

They wrote this fanfic in the fandom of The Untamed and it ended up being another one of my first binds.

I was still learning a lot and I was still using recycled copy paper for my binds. Though I am still learning, I am definitely using different paper by now and I am trying to be better with grain direction.

I drew the mirror on my iPad, because I wanted to have something at the beginning of the story. The first page seemed a little bare to me without at least a little picture and since a mirror is featured in the story, I figured I'd just draw one.

For the covers I used an old folder that I cut to size and the spine is just some design paper which is thicker than regular paper but definitely not as thick as the board I used for the covers.

As you can see, the glue made the first pages warp a little, because I didn't use any paper or whatever in between the cover and the body of the book, which I do now. Also, I was still cutting the edges by hand and tried to smooth them a bit by actually sanding them with sandpaper. That worked... not as well as I wanted it to.

But in the end I was satisfied, because: I made another book! :D

In 2022, I bound this fic, again, just because I could and I wanted to try out different paper. This time, I printed it on white copy paper, but still without concern for grain direction. (I didn't have the name "cardsnwords" back then, which is why it says "thisismylifenao" on there.)

Here you can also see that the edges are not really smooth and that they are even kinda dirty because of the *cough* not so good *cough* sandpaper I used.

Also, in hindsight, I shouldn't have used space between the paragraphs, because in a bound book that just looks weird. But either way, I am happy that I stuck with binding books.

[al-numbers]

Note by Note by @funkily

After lurking on the bookbinding and fanbinding tags for months, I finally decided to take the plunge and try doing one of my own!

I have printed fanfic a long long time ago, but I haven't tried to make it into an actual book (well, booklet) till recently. I have loved this fic since I read it and so trawled through more knowledgeable blogs like Renegade Publishing and armoredsuperheavy to find out how to turn it into a portable booklet or phamplet.

The cover is made from 2 pieces of black cardstock glued together for extra strength. It worked almost perfectly except for the formation of a bulge on the inside of the black cover - maybe from the papers stretching from the glue?

The pages are A5 Daolin Chinese paper, which is also what the cover strips are. I printed the title and summary full-size, cut the edges with a ruler, and glued them onto the cover with some wrapped-around bits plunging into the space between the two layers of cardstock. As you can see from the smudginess of the back summary, my hands were very sweaty from attempting this, eheheh.

I also found some images from the internet to fit the overall vibe and mood of the story. All in all, for my first booklet (16 pages) I think it didn't gone too bad!

Fonts used: Doves Type Text (new version) and Garamond.

Thank you so much to funkily for the fic!

[cardsnwords]

The first fanfiction I bound was the wonderful yesterday, tomorrow by sophiahelix on ao3.

This story took my breath away and made me want to start binding fanfictions into books so I could always have them on my shelves. Can't believe that was back in June of 2021. Almost exactly three whole years ago!

Anyway, I have learned a lot since then and of course I have amassed way too much material and stuff for this wonderful hobby. I may not bind fics every month or every week, but even after a longer break, I always come back to it. There are just so many different facets to bookbinding that I only found out about while doing it which makes it so varied and fun.

Thanks to the resources that @armoredsuperheavy made public and all the info from @renegadeguild, the editing of the fic and the eventual binding were really easy. Of course, I'm still learning more with every fic I bind and I don't think that will stop anytime soon.

Right. Enough about this.

@sophia-helix made me want to start binding fics and now I have more than 12 books made and more to come.

[tinwhiskerpress]

Since there's been an interest in seeing people's first binds, here are some pictures of mine, along with some of the many lessons I learned from it.

The fic is Starlines by @infinitelystrangemachinex - honestly I picked it because it was the right length (or I thought so at the time) and I didn't think the author would mind. We're still friends so I think it was okay.

So to start with the top, I knew I was skipping headbands, but I also hadn't figured out yet quite where the block was supposed to sit with respect to the shoulders. The book opens and closes perfectly well, but the spine is definitely weird. And also uneven.

The cover material is plain quilting cotton - it might be backed with paper using Heat'n'Bond but I'm not even 100% sure of that. The corner turn-ins are a bit too tight, and the pattern has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents, but it's a very pretty print with silver accents.

I was working with what I had around the house, so the endpapers are just text-weight colored printer paper. I'm not bothered by being able to see the turn-ins and the mull, I kind of like it, but it's really hard to get paper that thin not to wrinkle. The back is not this nice-looking.

Also the square is a little too large at the head and tail, and the block is unevenly placed. Honestly the square at the fore-edge might have been big too if I'd pushed the block all the way up against the spine. Not long after this book, I made myself a spreadsheet to do all the calculations. I put in the textblock dimensions and it'll give me the board and cloth dimensions I need. I've had great results with it.

To date this is the only book I've chisel-trimmed (head only, I think) and it's a bit rough. My chisel wasn't truly sharp enough and I really still don't have the hang of the process. These days, I have no problems trimming a 3-signature book with the craft knife. Larger than that either goes in the guillotine or just doesn't get trimmed.

For the most part, I was pleased with the typeset itself. I picked a shortish story so I could practice fast, had a lot of fun with Star Wars fonts, and really my only regrets are not making the text larger when I had the chance and not getting the right-hand pages' page numbers right-justified. That is ingrained on my mental checklist now.

It's printed on plain white printer paper, and I think that's just fine.

The downside of it being so short is that it's only three signatures. Three signatures is actually harder to sew and manage than larger - you don't really get your first kettle stitch until the third signature. If I had it to do over again, I would either have reimposed it or started with a larger story to have five or more signatures.

For comparison, about two years later I went back, touched up my typeset, and made a copy for the author. Made a whole new set of mistakes with that one, but it's all a learning process.