Starting off the new year right! I was incredibly blessed to spend 8 days in January in Athens, Greece, attending a leather bookbinding course taught by dimitris_bookbinding_corner alongside a lovely group of fellow @renegadepublishing members from around the world!
Dimitris was a fantastic teacher, patiently dealing with all of our in-jokes, quips, and my bad habits (even if they made him cringe 😂). His teaching style satisfied my own thirst to know *why* you do something, not just that you're supposed to do it. Dimitris also challenged us to push outside of our comfort zones (I'm sorry guys before this every endband I ever sewed I opened up the book for every tie-down. yes, even all the ones in the last post.). I learned so much, and I hope to be able to put it into practice in the future. I highly recommend his classes!
We bound a stunning Carmilla + The Vampyr combo typeset, created by fellow Renegade member @zhalfirin with art frames from Alphonse Mucha. I got a chance to work on leather and brass tooling skills in person (both things I was very nervous about!), repped Star Wars a lot, eat delicious Greek food and snacks, and best of all, the opportunity to spend a whole 8 days in Greece with the best group of people (and a whole lot of friendly cats!).
Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)
Process under the cut.
Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)
I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.
After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)
Then, leather:
As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.
I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)
The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)
The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.
It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.
If you've been following me for a while you may remember that I started this typeset in, ahem, November 2022. Finished it in October 2023. Finished binding it in 2025. Did I make it take 3 years on purpose? Or was it always second on my list of projects and I was totally going to do it soon?... I don't want to talk about it.
Blatant lie: I do want to talk about it.
What's fun about this bind is that I found the leather for it in Greece in spring 2024. It's shiny! It's sort of pearlescent! It's white! It's absolutely not made for bookbinding! I knew that at the time, but hear me out: it was shiny. It was sort of pearlescent. It was white. It was also prone to scuff marks and stretchy as fuck.
It was also, it turned out, about 1" too short to do a full cover.
So I abandoned my dream of doing this Beatles White Album style and added the stripe down the middle. (I then drew a harpoon on that stripe at the last second because I thought it looked too much like a flag.)
I used a hot stamping machine to make the patches for the spine. It was my first time trying that: in the future, I'm going to pare the leather before cutting the patch, as that gave me a lot of trouble and I was ultimately unsuccessful. So it looks a little bulky right here, but, such is life. I seriously considered listing the author as Merman Helville, but I refrained.
This was my third laced-cord binding (wherein the cords are laced in through holes in the cover board and then hammered--mostly--flat) and I've decided it will be my last. Will I stick to this? Who knows, that's what I said when I finished my first one and also my second one. I might try fake raised cords in the future, or sew onto cords but then only lace them in through one hole to keep the cover smooth. This would mean I still have to fray them out, though, which is not particularly fun. (It's improved by doing so while watching Black Sails.)
My goal for the typeset was to make it technically readable but absolutely impractical, and I think I have achieved this.
I still think the last page is tied with the "Oh fuck" halo as the funniest pages I've ever typeset.
This is the first time since high school that I've tried converting a paperback into a hardback, and it was more finnicky than I remembered: possibly because my standards have risen. The FA:FO ratio was skewed a bit towards the later.
Some process photos under the cut.
Initially I tried doing the cutout by cutting the leather into strips, making sort of a flower pattern on the back: I was unable to get the leather to curve with that method, so I ended up gluing it to the edge of the board with PVA and then shaving off the remaining bits with my paring knife.
I then added the backing page to the front cover, and used thin fragments of paper to make an inside joint with the collage page:
The snow on the mountain and then moon are foil quill--the moon is from a very high-tech stencil I made with a hole punch.
I did a lot of practicing for the tooling on the cover and spine, and only set a handle on fire one time, so I think I should be commended there. For the first time I tested my theory of "draw the design on the foil in sharpie and then tool over it," which worked fine, since the sharpie is only on the plastic layer on top. So I'll keep doing that going forward, it made a lot of things easier.
Fanbinding: Do Every Stupid Thing by thepartyresponsible
Xmas present for @terracedsky. Life is about doing Very Serious Bindings of crackpairings, and so that is what I did. In this process I learned many things like, "DONT tool straight lines oh my god what is wrong with you," "if you're GOING to tool straight lines then use a different strategy" (the same design is on the front and back because it's an aesthetic choice. Definitely not because I didn't like how the front came out so I flipped it over and tried again) "do the spine before you run out of propane" and "those little propane bottles can't actually be refilled."
Fic binding: In Which Merlin Reveals His Magic, Arthur Embarks On A Quest, And Uther Absolutely Does Not Admit He Was Wrong About Anything, Ever, by @alex51324
Over a year after typesetting and sewing it: finally done!! This was the first time I tried to deboss-- I used two thin pieces of board for the cover, used a cricut to cut the dragon shape out of one of them, and then glued them together. Turns out jabbing at leather with a pointy stick is kind of relaxing. (Also, for a first attempt, I should probably have chosen something with fewer tiny points.)
When she was younger she watched people carefully in order to become them, but it was like memorising a song in another language: the imitation was perfect but she never bothered to learn what it meant.
I started this about a year and a half ago when I was first experimenting with leather bindings: I didn't like it, so I stuck both copies (with equally bad bindings) in a drawer for a while before finally cutting the bad covers off a few weeks ago.
I made the one at the top first (which I sent to the author): I was planning on duplicating it exactly for the second one, but there were some flaws in the second piece of leather I wanted to cover up, and I didn't have any more good edge on that first blue. So! They get to be mirrors of each other instead. (I think I like the lighter blue better, but prefer the author name on the right side of the cover.)
Sanding under the paper onlays was significantly more complicated than I thought it would be, since I had to make sure I wasn't sanding the leather where it would show in the holes for the leathers. I ended up putting the letters down in removable vinyl and sanding around them, but getting it all to align right was very stressful. 0/10 I'm sure I will do it again because I do like how that came out. er
The process of paring leather is just "wow this is easy, my blade is sharp and my angle is perfect, clearly I have mastered this skill" *three inches later* "there is no angle that can scrape this smooth, for the leather is clumping and spotty. Clearly this goat died specifically to torment me and this particular spot is where in life it bore the mark of the Devil" *turns corner and starts on next side* "this is easy what was I so mad about"
