I have been working on this edition of Flowey is Not a Good Life Coach by @unrestedjade since the year started. The typeset took a while to proofread amid other projects, and then I had to try and find free assets for the specific imagery I was looking for - namely, crawling, suffocating vines. THEN I had to make all the graphic design fit, then make the printer somehow bend to my will to print it all correctly (which ended up being a hell of a mixed bag, but I'm hoping it's not super visible here), and THEN binding.
But, when all is said and done, I think this is a totally beautiful book, and hands down one of my best so far. The endbands are "simple front beaded," and this is only my second time sewing them directly into the book. While I definitely need more practice, I'm so jazzed by them. This was also my first time doing loads of "big book" techniques: namely, sewing onto tapes, rounding, and using a thinner cardstock for the spine in order to accommodate a more flexible shape. In the end, it really is beautiful, and a love letter that I am proud to have created to one of my favorite fanfics ever.
Pulse of Life Press 1st Anniversary - and an experiment!
It's been a whole year since I started this crazy artform! I can't believe it myself. The amount of books I've made in the past year has long since hit the double digits, and each and every one of them is incredibly important to me, flaws and all.
However, there was one book - my first book - that had more issues than the others, some that outright interfered with reading. Luckily I've been learning book repair at the same time as binding, but when I tried to fix some of the problems for Bernhardiner, it went...well... about as badly as it could.
What to do, then, with a ruined book? I didn't have enough decorative paper to completely redo the cover, with all the little dogs. But then I thought - why not leave the cover? I know how books work - I could pretty easily detach the whole case from the ruined textblock, make a new textblock, and just reuse the old case. It seemed like a sound experiment. Now, for the press's first anniversary, I have compiled most of the process under the cut, complete with pictures.
Please come along with me on this journey!
This was the beginning of the process, after having slooowly and carefully detached the endpapers of the textblock (right) from the case itself (left). You might remember this from my recent shitpost! To loosen the adhesive and separate the two parts without ruining either one, I initially slid a bonefolder into the hinge area of the case, and then switched to a thin little boi called a microspatula to slip through the glue not unlike a letter opener.
This did lead to some wear and tear on the boards of course, but it could have gone a lot worse. Most binders that I've learned from use a homemade wheat paste to attach case to textblock, but so far I have not been able to make it without the ingredients turning into an Oobleck-esque gelatin. Thus I use PVA glue, which is far stronger, and can lead to things like this. Still, not too bad. The case was successfully salvaged!
Before I describe and show off the redux, I just wanna share a couple of the errors and mistakes I made on the first textblock here, as I usually try and photograph my books with the least amount of flaws visible. Here we can see, firstly, that the glue job on the spine was shoddy at best; none of it really got quite between the individual signatures of the book, leading to weird gaps like that which compromise the stability of the book and show off the spine liner/mull, to my dismay.
In the other two pics you can see page numbers where they're definitely not supposed to be. Ah, MS Word, you son of a bitch and your terrible, terrible pagination settings. Took me months and months to learn how to paginate my books correctly, up until about my FINAGLC bind.
Not enough glue here on the pre-made endbands, either. It would sometimes fold under while reading, which wasn't super fun to see.
Finally, the botched repair that started this whole journey - I had attempted to fix one of the gaps between signatures (seen earlier) with some Japanese repair tissue, but ended up sticking these pages awkwardly together and fucked up that little top part there. A nightmare!
For all the above reasons, I actually decided to go back to my original typeset and revamp it. I've gotten some... teasing in my binding groups for the fact that my first few books were set in Times New Roman (which I actually find satisfying to read, thank you very much), which apparently gives off a sort of amateurish vibe. I've been experimenting with body fonts since, and the two I reliably use at the moment are usually Sylfaen (for shorter, smaller books) and Baskerville Old Face (for longer books). I switched it to Sylfaen here, and you can compare and contrast the results far down below.
Now, I'm not going to detail the entire bookmaking process here - just the interesting bits. If you want to learn how to make books, I highly suggest checking out @renegadepublishing's resources, as they're how I learned. But here we can see all the new signatures of the new edition nice and crisp and printed. In the second photo they've even been punched for sewing already!
At the co-op where I print and sew my textblocks, I often get to use real nipping presses like this bad boy right here. It's entirely metal (iron?) and way too heavy to lift. Between the two scrap papers peeking out is the new Bernhardiner!
But at home, this is my current set up:
Everyone, meet the eponymous Pulse of Life Press. POL Press, meet everyone.
A family member of mine made the wood part (obviously, a separate piece from the HS books) for me last Christmas, with no real knowledge of what a book press should look like at all. It's sort of a cross between what's known as a lying/finishing press and just some sort of regular old clamp. I line it with wax paper, stick the spine of the book in the center, tighten, and then cover the rest of the textblock with my trusty viz Homestuck books. It's a little MacGyver-y, but it's served me well.
This is the part where you glue the spine, attach the endpapers, and so forth.
For this redux, I decided to continue practicing making my own endbands instead of using the same pre-made ones I had for the first copy. These ones actually came out pretty darn well, if I do say so myself! They're the absolute neatest I've made them so far, and that's a relief. Obviously I still need work, but it's so lovely making them. <3
After this, I actually don't have a lot of pictures! It's basically just press, attach the spine liner and glue again, press again, casing in, and then...
Et voila!
Lookin' pretty good, if I do say so myself.
I didn't get exact duplicate photos of the original textblock's mistakes for a before/after, but you can probably just tell from these just how cleaned up the new one is. Rest assured those pesky out-of-place page numbers are long gone, and my spine gluing has gotten a lot better. I'm honestly just glad that it cased in so well - I was worried about that flaky board for a minute there!
And that's all. Thank you for coming with me on this little peek behind the scenes! Here's to many more books in the coming year - more to read, more to make, and more to write.
Latest bind is this train by seimei / @blurryobjects! This fic feels like a director's cut of the original FF7 with a pronounced focus on Tifa and Aerith's journeys in the game. It made me cry when I first read it, and then it made me cry twice when I was typesetting it. It's fucking good ya'll.
The endpaper art is actually by the author as well - I knew when I saw it I'd have to incorporate it into my design somehow. Here is a link to the original post so you can lavish love upon it!
In regards to the bind itself, this is my best typeset hands down. I worked super hard to make it classy as fuck, and I hope to carry the Word wrangling techniques I learned into future typesets. I'm honored to have this gal (book) on my shelf <333
Newest binding is an anthology of rynegaia fics by @margaritadaemonelix and MirrorMystic! This one was so lovely to work on. The endpapers are pretty wonky, but otherwise it’s a good book, with easy-to-flip-through pages, great typesetting (if i do say so myself) and VERY cute spacer icons.
You can find the first two fics (black cloud and white cloud) here,
This is a book I've wanted to do ever since I started binding - it's a short FFXV series called Long Way Home by @ninemoons42-lestallumhaven. This gorgeous little gladnis romance is situated in a war vet and bookshop modern AU. I tried to take the feel of the book and the imagery within and put that into the case, hence the tradtional-looking brown crosshatch bookcloth (it's Duo, iykyk) and a dainty little floral design in gold foil. Thank you to ninemoons for allowing me to bind her work! <3
Newest book is... actually one of my own fics, called (in parentheses)! This is one of two fics of mine I have plans to bind because they’re my two favorites. This one definitely has a special place in my heart, I think because I was able to say everything I wanted to say about the Thancred + Urianger + Ryne dynamic through the lens of Thancred’s ptsd, and did it pretty well to boot.
In binding terms, this is actually I think the best book I’ve done yet. The typesetting is good, my lines are getting cleaner for cutting/measuring, and the endpapers glued in perfectly. (I bungled the spine, but we don’t have to talk about that. :p) Also, dat epigraph.
My second fanbind! This is a copy of Postcards From Small Places, a DBH hankcon fic by the lovely @ghost-teat! The pages came out a little wavy, I think I might have overglued some bits...
Most of the story takes place in the boonies of Eastern Canada, so I picked a tacky old-timey Canada map for the cover :D
