#half cloth binding

[heliotropepajamas-books]

Fanbinding: Old Friend, Come Home Series by annecoulmanross

Binds #37 & 38

Old Friend Come Back Home (Series) by annecoulmanross Date Completed: September 21, 2025 Size: Legal Quarto.  44,674 words, 197 pages

This is a delightful series of afterlife fics in The Terror fandom, and does a great job of combining the show’s canon with historical details.  Since there were Victorian Ladies present (Ann Coulman Ross and Sir Franklin’s 1st wife) it was also a good excuse to use some of my more frilly supplies and fonts.

This was a series of 7 works, all with slightly different formats, so setting up the text was a good challenge to get consistency across stories with chapters, with subheadings, and one shots.  I must have looked through a million handwriting fonts for titles before settling on the basic Edwardian Script that comes standard with most word processors.  You can’t beat a classic!  And it paired well with Garamond for the body font.

Couldn’t find any instructions for doing a half binding for the cover (that’s the little corner bits out of cloth as well as the spine) so I just winged it.  I can’t say it’s a technique I’m going to use over and over again, but the flourish seemed appropriate for these volumes.  Endpapers are two coordinating scrapbook papers that look like a mix between calico print and embroidery.  

I tried to get artsy and take photos in the rundown cemetery at the end of my street, but the tombstones in the background came out a little odd.

[dddots]

Society of Bookbinders - Certificate of Competence Cloth Cased-In Books #3

A half binding usually has a spine strip and a fore-edge strip measuring between ⅓ and ¼ the width of the book. However, that works mainly for portrait books and the proportions will be more pleasing to the eye. When covering a landscape book using the half binding technique, I thought it might look a little strange when I followed that rule, so I did a little sketching and calculations and decided that ⅙ the width of the book seems ideal for this size. I am now unsure if this is even considered a half binding since the fractions have changed.

This week’s Cloth Cased-in book is a soft-back, multisection half cloth binding using a patterned cloth on the spine and fore-edge, and a solid colour paper. This is the opposite of what is usually done, where the cloth used is usually a solid colour. The pages are made with 90gsm Strathmore Charcoal paper with laid finish.