#imp press

[penguinmerchant]

There's only one kingdom now...

And only one place to find deals this good! Come on down and take a look at the first ever advertisement zine for the kingdom of New Artes!

With all of your favorites (and maybe a few new ones!) this is the only place you need to go to find the best deals in New Artes. This is another 1 page zine, so all you need to do if you want to print this is use one sheet of paper!

My attempt at a pretty shot of it....along with all (well, most of) my Capri books 😀

I had a ton of fun making this! The idea probably exceeded my design skills by about two thousand percent but I think it was pretty fun regardless. Thank you @wrenaspun for the idea help, font help and for making the Guerin's Jewelers ad come to life! And thanks again to @quelmdn for her amazing art. I used Electric Zine Maker for this and while it's probably not the best program for all your photoshop needs it is free an it is very cute!

If anyone makes their own copy of this PLEASE send me a pic! I'd love to see it in the wild. And if anyone has any ideas for a future zine, let me know! I'd love to discuss or at the very least hear what you guys are interested in. I think these are lots of fun and I love getting to share them with you guys, so I hope you love it too!

[uispeccoll]

“Much time it took to make this book so as you read, take time and heed.”

Here's a teeny, tiny #miniaturebook from Auckland, New Zealand! At the time of its publication, it was the smallest book ever printed in NZ. Published by Imp Press in 1977. It is a book with advice and sayings. 

[penguinmerchant]

Full Length of the Soul binding

So I've been a busy little bee lately! Now that all these books have reached their recipients I'll start posting them, and I want to start with one of my favorites---@wrenaspun's lovely fic, The Full Length of the Soul. I wanted to do something simple for this bind (opinions may vary on whether or not I hit that target) but this came together for me really quickly, and I'm really happy with it.

More pics and details under the cut.

So the idea was for this to be a half binding, where half of the front was bookcloth and half was marbled paper. As you can see the font of the title took up quite a bit more than that, and it became more like a three quarters binding. Will I eventually regret not putting some bookcloth on the outer edge? Maybe. It's pretty sturdy paper so I hope it'll be okay.

I used some marbled cream and gold paper for the endpapers. These are the marbled jute paper from Mulberry Papers and I have two 8x11s of almost every color in my stash. Very handy for situations like this, I was able to find something perfect without needing to order anything (unlike my other bindings...)

Here's a pic of the back.

Ugh I just love it, it's way simpler than the other books I've done lately but it really gives the marbled paper a chance to shine. That paper is Crepaldi, of course, and the bookcloth is duo (I am going to LOSE IT when I run out of my stash of duo, it's beautiful and I love it so much, I don't know what I'm going to do). All the gold, including the bands on the front and back, are HTV. I did protect the marbled paper with parchment while I was ironing it on but it did surprisingly well and the heat didn't damage the paper at all.

All in all this was a very easy bind! The guillotine didn't give me any trouble and the casing in was really easy. Even the HTV went done really nicely. I forgot to take a picture of the spine before I sent it away but it's just the title and it even went on straight and everything.

[penguinmerchant]

"Pet" Binding (with a twist)

This binding is a little different than what I've done so far! This is "Pet" by C.S.Pacat, but with notes from @lucky-clover-gazette. The notes on this read along were SO funny and I knew I wanted to feature them in a bound work, but they wouldn't really make sense without the context of the original work. And so I mushed both the original work and the notes together!

So the idea here was to make it look like a composition notebook, complete with stickers on the front and (as we'll soon see...) drawings and scrawled notes on the inside. "Sam Reads CaPri" is the tag that Lucky Clover uses for her read along notes, and so I used it here just to make it clear this wasn't just the canon work. I used black and silver marbled paper to complete the look of the composition notebook, and more direct-to-film transfers for the "stickers" on the cover. I think it turned out fantastically!

More pics and a LOT of notes under the cut.

So I thought this was a really interesting project because I wanted to use the original work but add to it. I...acquired a PDF of Pet (let me have this one, I bought 2 official english copies of the short stories AND a Polish one I can't even read!) and messed with the margins a bit to make more room for Lucky Clover's notes. Here's what it looks like inside.

This whole thing was done in Libre Office, by the way. I'm sure there's a better program out there that would have done this WAY easier but I didn't want to have to learn how to use Adobe (or pay for it, honestly). But so the little notes are added with textboxes and placed next to their respective quotes, and the quotes themselves are highlighted with highlighters used for bibles, which is apparently a whole subset of office supplies I never knew about! I needed those highlighters specifically because I wanted to have archival color (no idea if regular highlighters are, these are just the only things that came up from a quick search) AND they're really good because they are made not to bleed through really thin bible paper. So on regular paper you can barely see them through the other side at all. They're great! Thanks bible highlighters, I know you thought you would be used for more holy purposes but really there's no better writer than Pacat, so you're in good hands!

So the other problem was that some of the notes were too long to shove into the margins, even after I had made them bigger than normal. That meant post-it notes! Now these aren't actual post-it notes, obviously (I can't imagine how terrible it would be to line those up in the printer) but I used colored printer paper and cut them to size, and it worked out. I used a bit of glue to get them down, and made it so that all of them fold away from the text so that everything is still readable. And then I made some of them poke out the top and sides, because I liked the way it looked.

There are little doodles throughout, some of which I colored in with a highlighter, and I the first word in each section is in a scribbly font, which I thought was funny. All of the notes are likewise in a handwritten font (Amanda Rose) and slightly rotated so that they're not in line with the text.

I also did not trim any of the sides of this textblock, so it's kind of uneven (deckled edges are common on the long side of the textblock, not so much on the top and bottom) but I kind of needed all the space. No endbands in this one either, I wanted to keep it more notebooky and the uneven pages meant it would have been impossible to do anyway. Everything else was bound normally, so aside from the two thousand years it took me to typeset this it was a pretty easy bind.

Oh, and last but not least, the endpapers:

Plain brown butcher paper, in honor of Berenger.

[penguinmerchant]

Trapped! Binding

My first sequel binding! From the Selkieverse series by @wrenaspun.

Since this is a sequel (or maybe an interlude would be a better description) to All This and Heaven Too, I knew I wanted to keep some of the same design elements as that binding. I kept the lighthouse illustration but changed the title area. Here's a pic of the two together.

So while the first book had the wave elements underneath the title, I wanted something different for the Trapped! binding. It's reminiscent of a net, to go with the trapped theme, and I think it plays really well with that space in the same way the original one did.

For the endpapers I went with a subtle white wave, similar but still different from the first binding's more stylized gold waves. The back of this one matches the back of the original as well.

(ignore the glue mishaps I had with this one (and also the janky cutting job I did lol) the author copy was much better I promise!)

And I reused the title page again (with the name changed, obviously) and since the title was so long on the first one and so short on the second I elongated it with a few decorative pieces.

The biggest challenge with this one was how short it was; less than 30 pages, and I had to pad it out a little with some blank pages at the end. It sits...okay in the binding, but really I don't think this kind of case is the best solution to such a short work. I didn't want to change it to something else, though, because I wanted them to look similar when they sat on the shelf. And it worked! But it was a little janky to get it in there. And the book itself sits nicely, the case closes without any problem, so I'm happy with it.

Bookcloth is duo, cover is just cardstock, designs on the front are a mix of HTV (on the bookcloth) and toner reactive foil (on the cardstock). Still can't get that toner reactive foil to work the way I want it to, but it turned out okay.

[penguinmerchant]

"Darkrooms" Binding

My latest binding! This is the author's copy, my copy is still in the press and looks exactly the same except I melted one corner with the iron, lol. It gives it character. Right? RIGHT?

This is a Red Dead Redemption 2 fic by Besselfcn featuring Arthur Morgan and Albert Mason--so well written, just an amazing voice and it's short but really packs a punch. I used covers like this and this for inspiration, although this one came out to be more complicated than those. Used some of my precious Duo bookcloth for the green, which looks amazing. Anyway, I think there are some really cool parts to this binding. More pics under the cut.

The endpapers, beautiful Renato Crepaldi papers that I knew I was going to use for this the instant I came across them on his instagram. They're meant to evoke a sunset (although they also look a lot like Jupiter to me--but the sunset part was what they were meant to look like, and the papers are part of the Skyscapes collection, so. Yeah.). It's so pretty up close, there are some really cool pictures on Crepaldi's instagram if you want to look at them more closely.

The spine, which echoes the wolf and moon theme from the front (I really like the spine, it's so small and usually so hard to line up right but this came out just perfectly)

The title page, foiled with toner reactive foil--boyfriend designed everything and he really liked this title page, even if it's the name of the first chapter and not the actual collection of stories, lol. But I liked it so much I couldn't help but include it. Along with:

All of the font designs and curlies were made by the boyfriend, but the pictures are all Arthur's. I found this reddit post where someone had collected all of the pictures Arthur draws in his journal, so these pencil drawings (well, printed pencil drawings) are all Arthur's actual pictures from the game. I thought it was such a neat touch and, because Arthur's journal is an important part of not just the game but this story as well, I thought it was important to include them. There are a few more random pictures for chapter breaks, etc. but they're not super fancy like this.

Anyway, not much more to say about this binding. It's getting easier to do these and I make fewer mistakes--I made the case on this just a smidge too short, or maybe made the textblock a smidge too big, but that was about it--and although the HTV is always a pain it's getting more reliable as well. This cover was a pain in the ass to weed, though, and needing to do it twice kind of sucked. Anything in the name of art though! I'm so excited for the author to see this and I'm really happy to be able to add this to my collection!

[penguinmerchant]

Short Stories Binding

I said I've been busy!

This next project is an anthology of short stories by YellowDiamonds! So this was an entirely new kind of cover for me, and I think it turned out perfectly. The font is regular HTV, but the photoshopped picture is a direct-to-film transfer. It was so easy to put down, with a little heat it set on the cover perfectly and there was no annoying weeding or peeling or anything. Getting the HTV to line up with it was the hardest part, but even that turned out great.

More info under the cut.

So here's some of the inside pages. The stories were split into these three categories, and the idea behind the borders was that canon was the most straightforward so it got a simple line border, canon divergent started to get more complicated and then alternate universe built even further on that complication. These pages are all made with toner reactive foil--I still can't seem to get the foil to have great coverage even though I used a laminator to set it, but they're still super shiny and I think it was successful.

Endpapers are very watery to go with the ocean theme on the front cover.

And here's the back just for good measure. Nothing fancy but getting that HTV to stay straight was a bitch. It's still a little wonky if you look super close but nothing as bad as my first attempt:

You can probably only see it if you zoom in, but on the first attempt the border was way too thin and it just was a nightmare to put down (this is the same bookcloth as the other pictures by the way, the lighting is just way worse in these pics). The front cover was also kind of janky and looking at it now I don't think it's even close to straight. But the real reason this cover ended up being discarded and not used was the spine:

(ignore fuzzy monster in the corner and all the junk in the back) The spine on this one was so crooked that I couldn't in good faith give this to the author. But it's okay (I say as I cry over my ruined duo bookcloth) because it was a good learning experience and the other copies turned out much better.

So yeah! The direct-to-film transfer turned out great, and it's probably something I'll use again in the future. I really like the combination of that and the HTV, it looks so snappy.

@wrenaspun, @penult

[penguinmerchant]

New Fic binding!

I've got a new fic bind! Today I want to show off @wrenaspun's lovely fic, All This and Heaven Too. It's seriously so good and so sweet, Lamen mixed with fairytales and legends (my favorite) and it's written so beautifully. Go check it out!

Anyway, here's the bind:

It's another binding like my Captive Prince short stories bind, with the cloth on the spine and then cardstock for the printed cover. The lighthouse illustration was a custom image done by my boyfriend and I think it turned out wonderfully!

More details about the binding process under the cut.

So since this is a shorter story than some of the others I went back to a 4x6 book. It still feels very nice in hand though, I think I'm getting better at either setting the textblock in the case or just measuring better (probably that last one, I'm usually too impatient to measure correctly) but these two books are probably some of the nicest set books I've made yet.

The back has a little flourish on it too, just to spice things up a little.

Endpapers are from Wagara Studio, I seriously love this chiyogami paper, it's almost like fabric and it's so easy to use. Setting this book and my previous binding were so easy with this paper. It would make an awesome cover as well, it seems really durable.

Some inside pics, the title page and the little section break image. I really love the title page image and I kind of wish I would have done that for the cover, but the design is so detailed that it would be impossible to do with HTV and it's too big to just do with the cardstock. So it had to be split like it is, but I'm still glad this picture got included.

The bookcloth is really not this stripey/checkery, I don't know why it came out like this in pictures. Ignore the mess in the back. I have to for sure clean up my little table before starting on the next project.

Anyway, not too many notes on the actual binding process this time. I did end up making an entire cover--HTV and everything--that turned out to be too small (remember that thing I said about me being mad at measuring?) because I made the spine 9mm instead of 10mm and like a dummy I forgot to test it with the textblock before doing all the work of finishing the cover. That one mm is such a small difference but it meant that the book couldn't be closed and so I had to scrap it and start over. Gonna be testing my covers for sure before I spend so much time on the design work. Gutters on this were 5mm, foiling on the cloth (I think it's dubletta cloth) was done with HTV, foiling on the cardstock cover was done with toner reactive foil.

Author copy will soon be on its way! Everyone please wish it good luck with the postal gods.