Midnight Strangers by Mitos (@seriouslycalamitous)
It’s finally done!!! This is officially the thickest book I’ve bound to date, coming in at 828 pages (796 of the fic itself). The Oxford hollow + bradel combination worked so well to support the textblock’s weight, and the foiled faux leather is super pretty, so I’m really happy with how everything turned out! I’ve learned a lot over the course of binding this that I will absolutely be using for my next thick bind.
The front cover of the book features the English title of the book hand foiled in gold. Around it are Bible verses written in Cantonese Chinese (Genesis 11:8-9) hand foiled in silver.
The back of the book is like a mirror of the front except that it has the Cantonese title of the book hand foiled in gold, and around it is the English translation of the same bible verses.
“So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO I PROUDLY PRESENT!!!!!! A FULL COLLECTION OF FISH N CHIP WORKS BY @earlgay-milktea !!!!!!!
My first ever leatherbound book!!!! Over 650 pages!!!!! My first time doing double core endbands!!!!! It’s all in here!!!!!!!!
It’s got custom graphics by @fishcop !!!! It’s got a couple graphics from me!!!!!! We’ve got it all!!!!!!
Ive been working on this book for over a year now and I’m so so proud to finally have it done. There’s a lot of stuff I could say about this bind but it mostly boils down to “holy shit I actually did it that’s so cool”
A lot of love and work went into this bind so if you have any questions please don’t be afraid to ask! Please!! I want to talk about it!!!!
Am thrilled to once again co-cheerlead with Lark [Frog Eye Press] @renegadeguild's annual curation of bad ideas edible "Books"! The only rules are (1) it has to vaaaaguely be "book"ish in nature and (2) you have to take a bite out of it
And my entry, for which I conveniently timed a delightful Renegade meetup in order to inflict it upon others. I remain impressed with how fun hanging out with these folks proves to be.
Shout out to Lark who continues to provide our super-rad prizes. I remain a corrupting influence on the server as this is the one "competition"/"competitive" event amongst the selection of other collaborative, gifting, educational, and/or generous activities put on year round.
{ you can find the slide deck of entries w/ link to vote here }
Remember, the @renegadeguild is a very serious bookbinding server
2025 was my first year as a @renegadeguild member and it was also the first year I took part in the annual Renegade Bindery gift exchange! This exchange is where we typeset and handbind a book as a gift for other members of the discord. Now all the pictures and typesets have been released, and now that my giftee (@kolutshanpress) has received the book I am able to share!
By The Still Waters is a really lovely Fenris/Hawke Dragon Age: Inquisition fic, I bound this fic blind and I had a blast doing so. I ended up making three copies of the fic, one for my giftee, one for my sister-in-law (who helped with the dragon age vibes as I knew nothing), and one for me because I loved the story so much.
I have to hugely thank the artist @kisunaexe for their gracious permission to use their art of Fenris and Hawke on the front and back cover of the bind. The cover was designed in Canva, printed on matte photo paper, and covered in soft touch laminate for protection. It is a little hard to see but the spine has ripples on it to mimic water. I really love how it all came together in the end.
For the title fonts, I used Asul and Inquisition Small Caps Normal from (or close to fonts from) the series to link the bind back to Dragon Age.
The chapter heading art is a recreation Fenris's chest tattoos, given how significant they are to the story. This was recreated with direct reference to concept art/screenshots from the series. I have done few colour typesets so wanted to have a go with a simple one to get me started here.
The spine has an oxford hollow for stability, and a rounded spine.
This was the first exchange I have ever had the pleasure to take part in and I can't wait to do it again at the end of this year!
Second book of 2026 finished! First book of the (mainly two-part) frerard series Gerard Way's Vampire Detective Agency and titled as such. As someone who is always a sucker for a good murder mystery (which it certainly delivers on), let alone a murder mystery that includes vampires, werewolves and their ilk, I was immediately enamoured with the series; not to mention that the world building is incredible, fun and compelling, especially as it all is laced through with an impeccable sense of humor.
Gushing aside, considering that this is a detective series (and one heavily influenced by Sherlock, considering the consulting agency) the cover design as well as typesetting was chosen to reflect aspects of the first edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; as well, as the summary is a reference to Clue, the title page similarly is a reference to the Clue board. I also had immense fun being able to play with the excerpts within the fic, in changing the typesetting to reflect the contents, plus, I finally got around to learning how to do double-core endbands, which I honestly have a lot of fun doing. All around I had good fun in putting this book together, and am currently close to finishing casing-in the second book of this series!
Gerard Way's (Vampire) Detective Agency by jjtaylor (M, 43k)
Pete, in Decaydance Mansion, with a yarrow stake. Frank and Gerard, in the greenhouse, with a plant of questionable origin. Bob, everywhere you look, with a gang of assassins for justice. Vampires, valets, pamphlets, haunted furniture, dub-thrall, disembodied voices, zombie couriers, and sinister rituals.
My friend @vyther15 (writing blog @vyther16) has been on a Now You See Me kick and both unwittingly and unknowingly dragged me along for the ride via tumblr feed, which means when I saw that he'd written a fic for the fandom, the first thing I did after reading it was decide it would be fun to get up to shenanigans and bind her a copy of it as a surprise. (With the added bonus of completing a project for Binderary 2026 with @renegadeguild!)
streetlight eyes wide by vyther15
On the fifth day of Olivia hiding in her room, Henley knocks outside of mealtimes. "I, uh, I wanted to talk to you about something a little more important than food."
Olivia slinks over to the door. "I know you're Henley Reeves," she says. "And I know you killed my brother."
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," Henley says, voice wry.
(or, Henley Reeves adopts Jack Wilder's little sister. It's only mostly on accident.)
Once I started typesetting it, I realized that it was the perfect length to make into a sextidecimo (2 1/8 x 2 3/4 inch pages), and wouldn't you know but a deck of cards is 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches which isn't too far off, and what would The Horsemen's magic tricks be without a deck of cards, and we all know I love a fun lil theme... so I committed very hard to the bit. I found a horrible quality promo photo from NYSM2 that featured a deck of The Eye cards which I then spent an entire day recreating out of shapes and color alteration of existing images in Canva. Was it the easiest way to go about it? Certainly not. But if we have learned anything about me, it's that I love to recreate a thing so I can manipulate it to my will in a typeset, and it worked out! With minimal swearing even! My initial plan was to use that for the title page, but then I decided it was simply too chaotic and difficult to read the text, so Ace Of Spades card for the title! Complete with a playing card font for the title and page numbers to cinch the legitimacy. And then to further embrace the Deck Of Cards theme, each scene break (since there are no title pages) is a different card suit and it somehow magically worked out perfectly to finish the cycle from beginning to end.
At first, I had grand plans of doing a full cloth case and foiling the card back design onto it, but uh. Were you aware that 2.5x3 inches is rather small? And there's a lot of detail in that design? I abandoned that idea pretty quickly and decided to use some lovely marbled paper from a friend (who also gifted me the paper I used for end pages!) and instead committed somehow EVEN HARDER to the idea of a deck of cards. By making a box for the lil guy to live inside. And you best believe I sat there with two different brands of cards to compare while designing to make sure I got everything as close to legit as possible. (Spot the text going up AND down the sides, plus copyright text on the bottom and flap -- or in my case, gift note and book curse, and a little tab cutout and hinge fold so the box doesn't bust apart when you reach in to pull out your cards book)
I'm not sure I'm fully converted to the Tiny Book Crew but I'm very pleased with how the lil guy turned out and how quickly it all came together. And how much less painful it is to have to reprint the entire thing. Multiple times. After mis-cutting. And realizing I'd borked the page numbers somewhere along the way of strategically adding blank pages to remove from each signature rather than have to procure 12 additional pages of text.
Binding details below the cut!
No font size or spacing info this time, because I typeset for quarto since it's the same scale, and then just made it smaller when I printed.
Body font: EB Garamond
Title font: JQKA Wild
Text message font: Nirmala UI
Bookcloth: Brillianta Dark Red from Colophon Book Arts
Endpages and cover paper: gifts from a @aetherseer , exact details unknown
Spine design: We R Memory Keepers foil quill in silver
I can barely believe this book is done, after 1 year of planning! 💗
There's this feature of the ACOTAR fandom, in which we have great writers who show us how much better the source material could be if we tuned up a couple of things... Like Rhys's villainous nature (or his caring side), Rhys and Tamlin's communication, or even if we added some actual difficulties for our beloved MCs!
In this anthology, I wanted to honor those retellings that I loved so much, here with a specific focus on Feysand - love them or hate them, you can't deny that Rhys and Feyre are really made for one another!
In order of appearance, here are the chosen fics:
"All He Thinks About Is Me", by @separatist-apologist: in which Rhys shows his darkest nature in some delectable non/dub-con UTM.
"Hate Me Instead", by @popjunkie42: in which Rhys acts more like a normal person and less like a douche and actually helps Feyre with all the UTM PTSD.
"The Portrait of a Male", by HopeLions13: in which Feyre goes UTM to save Rhys, and him and Tamlin get to have a much needed têta-à-tête.
"I Was Enchanted To Meet You", by @separatist-apologist: in which Rhys shows his darkest nature (yes, there's a pattern here), but now post-UTM.
"Chains", by @popjunkie42: in which Lucien succeeds in kidnaping Feyre back to the Spring Manor and some truths are revealed under the effect of substances.
Feysand's story is inevitably one in which Feyre transitions from Spring into the Night Court, and I wanted to bring that to the center of this book - as if she could look straight at Ramiel from her window in the Spring Manor ✨
The first endpaper is a collage of the Prythian courts symbols (made by me, inspired by those depicted in the back of the official Prythian map) beside this beautiful Velaris backdrop, created by GioSketches.
Cover was hand-painted - and that just goes to prove that you really can do any new technique if you set your mind to it!
Left: anthology title page. Right: Brazillian editions of ACOTAR books.
Brazillian ACOTAR fans may recognize the title font - because yes, I tried my best to emulate these beautiful editions from Galera Record, the best ACOTAR editions in my opinion.
I also incorporated the Brazillian edition's style of chapter headers, using a different element for each story.
This may be my favorite typeset so far, with all the little details added - the Night Court-themed dividers, and going full color explosion on the story title pages, really made it worth it to spend a year working on this book!
I really have to thank so much to all the authors featured, first for sharing their precious writing with us and then for giving me permission to bind their works 💞 This truly was a passion project if there ever was one!
It never goes without saying that all fanfic is and should always remain free: from fans, to fans, for free.
Materials & Techniques:
Endpapers: Velaris landscape by GioSketches; Prythian courts icons by me (made in Canva); Prythian map colored. Printed in matte photo paper.
Endbands: faux double core, made from wool-like multicolored thread.
Typeset in MS Word; printed on 80gsm white paper on an inkjet Epson ET-2850 printer.
Scene dividers and title pages made in Canva.
Bradel bind with 2mm bookboard, case covered in black faux leather and painted by hand using acryllic and fabric paints (and the tiniest brush you've ever seen).
