Extremely excited to have finished this bind for the incredible funpoison/frerard Danger Days fic Don't Need The System by @liberxi . Seriously during the process I kept getting distracted and rereading parts of the fic, it just sucks you back in...
I had a lot of fun designing the book; the cover inspired from the promotional posters of the spray painted spider over the BL/ind, which have a white, black and pink colour combo to represent the BL/ind (black and white) and pink (colour!) as a breaking away from the system to become Killjoys; something certainly applicable as the whole fic is on leaving the system. For the title I used a font very similar to the actual killjoys font (the true font you have to pay to use) while I also the secondary fonts where the BL/ind font throughout the book. I also thought it would be fun to switch out the chapter heading designs as the story progresses, and in the end choose a strawberry endpaper, also thematic to the fic.
Video of me handling the book and fic description below;
Don't Need The System by @liberxi (E, 145k)
Captured by BL/ind and forced to reintegrate into a system built on lies, Fun Ghoul has to navigate his new life in Battery City. If he wants to survive, he knows that he can't trust anyone, and that he definitely can't fall for a pretty smile - especially not when it belongs to a Scarecrow.
Finally FINALLY finished making another fan bound book! This is Little Souls in Blistered Light by @st-hedge . The cover is made from a print bought from St-Hedge's store and done in a 3 piece Bradel style bind, which imo is more forgiving and allows the art to show ver cleanly. The text block was printed put in 2024 but the bind finished today.
It has a really awesome smooth velevety feel because of the print cover.
It came out really clean though has a few flaws I can improve on in the future.
This year, for @renegadeguild's ffwad event, I bound New Wave by @yellowocaballero. This is probably one of my favorite binds I've done so far, it just came together so nicely.
The theme of the bind: PURPLE!
The cover is done with leftover purple book-cloth from a previous bind, with the title written using a foil quill and, because the fic is all about Steph, my favorite comic panel of her as Spoiler. I sewed the end-bands myself, and the end-papers are a gorgeous double marbled paper by Jemma Lewis.
And the star of the whole bind is, of-course, the beautiful shortgrain A4 paper that was a complete pain to get but allows the pages to sit open neatly!
This ffwad I also collaborated with Awl In One Press to typeset their bind of Stay out of Trouble by the same author. The typesets for both New Wave and Stay out of Trouble have been submitted to the Renegade Guild community typeset database, should you want to bind a personal copy.
Reached into the public domain to find this gorgeous collection of floral art. So I bound it into a book. Gonna be a gift for my plant science nerd of a friend.
This dang fanfic really does haunt me in the most beautifully painful way possible 😂 it's actually one of the fics that made me wanna start fanbinding honestly! Loved that there was even a playlist for it so included that as well for good measure! 💖
Slowly heading back into fanbinding, don't wanna jank my thumb because not only do I need it for binding, I need it for my uni work 👏😂
HOWEVER.. not how I planned for the cover to turn out even though happy with it 😂 long story short; thumb injury midway through the original cover made it a very slow process and my patience to get this made became non-existent 😂
Main take aways:
Gotta thank past me for having cut the boards already for this bind 🙏 also weeding this cover was A PROCESS but worth it!
I need to get me a bigger heat press in the future
Cream/ivory paper is stunning! Actually quite like how there's a mild ghosting from the other pages too!
I started fanbinding around July 2020! Happy five years to me making fanfiction into books 🥳 To celebrate, I finally sat down and took a count of (almost) every fanbind I've made in the past five years.
A million thanks to Cass of Battenkill Rose Bindery for the Catalogue typeset that I've been using to keep track of my progress over the past few years, @roseserpentpress for their amazing book log template that made it easy-peasy to move the information to a Google Sheet, and of course @renegadeguild for, well, everything <3
Some of these you can find in my fanbinding tag, and a smaller subsection of those have been cross-posted to ao3. The rest have been mailed to friends, authors, or are just for me and my shelf <3
On to the stats!
Some basic numbers:
TOTAL BOOKS: 90
TOTAL UNIQUE BOOKS: 64
TOTAL COPIES: 26
TOTAL FICS: 58
TOTAL ANTHOLOGIES: 5
TOTAL GIFTED (usually to authors, sometimes to friends): 29*
*this number is higher than "total copies" because I sometimes only make one copy of a fic, then gift it to someone! (i.e. Fandom Trumps Hate books)
TOTAL FANDOMS BOUND: 19
TOTAL SHIPS BOUND: 21
TOTAL WORD COUNT: 3,421,358 (wowie!)
BY YEAR (unique books only, not including copies)
2020: 10
2021: 16
2022: 12
2023: 11
2024: 6
2025: 9
OTHER STATS/FUN FACTS
Non-fic books (still fandom-adjacent): 6
WC of longest fic bound (not split across several volumes): 205,361
WC of shortest fic bound: 1,821
WC of longest anthology: 97,454
# of times I've bound other people's typesets: 4
# of times I've bound my own work: 2
First book: On Stranger Tides by @theroyalsavage, finished 8/1/2020. Link to post on tumblr and ao3.
Latest book: motion on a circle by @runesick, finished 7/2/2025. Link to post on tumblr and ao3.
~
THOUGHTS! (warning: they are sappy)
Wow! It's a little wild looking at the numbers all laid out like this, especially the number of books per year. I started out this hobby the way I do most hobbies: feet-first, full throttle. Over the years, I haven't been binding as much in terms of quantity, but I also started experimenting more with my binding practices, techniques, and designs. Every time I make a book, I try to do at least one new thing, to keep things fresh!
I could talk about meeting friends from all over the world in hotel conference rooms and retreat centers, squeeing over fanfiction and talking about art and yelling about our faves. I could talk about the letters and postcards I still exchange with those friends today, how our lives intersect in the most delightful of ways. How I may not know what someone does for work or what their real name is, but I know their current obsessions are, their favorite characters, their ongoing creative projects. I could talk about how my relationship with fandom has been changed for the better--how I learned firsthand how stats and numbers are not indicative of the quality of my work or the impact it might have on a person. How those numbers are only stand-ins for someone--an author, a reader, a commenter. I remember meeting Renegade friends in person for the first time--the first time I'd met any online friends in person--and seeing so many people who had been faceless usernames and profile pictures. I remember thinking--oh, you're real. You're just like me. We're all just writing stories about things we love. I remember watching a friend in real time read a fic I'd bound of my own work and thinking--oh. You're real. You're just like me. We're all just reading stories about things we love.
In many ways, it's actually really difficult for me to talk about fanbinding? There's so much I could say, and I don't know if I could adequately express everything. I could start with the story of how I got into fanbinding, which is the story of how a lot of my binding friends got started, too--namely @armoredsuperheavy's seminal guide/manifesto on how to make fanfiction into books. I could talk about how I found ASH's work in June 2020, looking for something to take my mind off of the pandemic, national tragedy, my school assignments. I could talk about how in July 2020 I joined a discord server called "Bookbinding Discord" (or something similar? I can't remember exactly haha), which--little did any of us know--would later bloom into Renegade Publishing. I could talk about Renegade Publishing, the name for our little group a tongue-in-cheek reference to imprints and big publishing houses; how what was originally tongue-in-cheek became not so tongue-in-cheek when, a few years later, we officially became a 501c nonprofit and a fully established artists' guild. I could talk about how that group, our group, Renegade Guild, is now explicitly dedicated to making this craft as accessible and affordable to as many people as possible, in the spirit of fandom gift economy. I could talk about there's a name for what we do now, fannish bookbinding (or just fanbinding), how there is now acafan scholarship written about the practice of fanbinding, and how cool (and sometimes terrifying) it's been seeing the practice make its way across so many different platforms, influence so many different communities, even the publishing industry itself. Because I was there, Gandalf. I was there when it was just a few weirdos (affectionate, I am one of the weirdos) making fics into books. (It is still a bunch of weirdos making fics into books, btw <3).
I could talk about how the way I read and engage with stories has changed. How, when you sit down to bind something, you breathe form into it. How you become the creator of that form, the designer of its physical vessel. How fanbinding allows you to see the work in a new way; how suddenly a million delightful questions arise, all clamoring for attention. How should I design a title page, a typeset, a cover? What themes from the story do I want to highlight in the book's design, its construction? What form and size should the book take? When you bind a fic, sometimes the design choices you make will only make sense to two, maybe three people. And sometimes that's the point! Sometimes you want ginkgo leaves on your endpapers ;) And sometimes you want something that a wider audience can understand (although the little in-jokes are still present, for those who go searching for them). Then you ask yourself: How can I convey what the author wanted to convey via an entirely different medium, even to people who aren't familiar with the source material? What are the basic principles of a strong design? What makes something beautiful? The story is already beautiful (at least, that's one of my own metrics for choosing to bind a work)--how can I do it justice?
I could talk about how my understanding of and appreciation for media preservation has deepened. How making books is a race against time and constant attempts to remove NSFW art (often queer art, often art by POC) from the Internet. (Hell, even as I write this, there's been another crackdown on NSFW creators on game sites like Steam and Itch.io.) Every time I sit down to make a new book I ask myself: what information do I need to include in the book for future reference--fonts, provenance, number of copies made, who those copies went to and why? What web of relationships will someone in ten, fifty, a hundred years be able to glean from this book? What materials should I prioritize getting so that these books will last as long as possible? Where will these books go after my death? When you start thinking on long enough timelines, you're hit with the humbling realization of how fleeting these stories can be. Once you get over the existential dread (or do your best to, aha), it only strengthens your resolve. You realize all over again how fucking cool it is you get to bind them to physical meatspace, how you get to decide what you want to preserve. You remember: at the end of the day, these books are containers for the story. If the corners don't exactly line up, if there are glue stains on the cover, if you don't have the fanciest papers or equipment, so what! The point of the book is to give the story a home. It's okay if that home is a little wonky, so long as the foundation is there, so long as the bones are good. (Tell you a secret? I've maybe cased only a handful of books completely straight. They all still work perfectly fine :D)
I could talk about how this hobby has given me the courage to try things I never would've tried otherwise. How one love always enriches another. How this hobby is actually a gateway to a million other hobbies ("a million hobbies in a trenchcoat"--Renegaders, in the spirit of establishing provenance, I'm officially claiming being the first person to have coined our beloved "a million (although I think I say "dozen" in the post, haha) hobbies in a trenchcoat" adage. You can find the first instance of me saying this under point #3 in the link, although someone please feel free to challenge me on this, heh :3). In the name of fanbinding, I've found myself in weaving classes, in paper marbling classes, in boxmaking classes. I've volunteered as a docent at a printing museum. I've visited professional bookbinders and toured their workshops. I've found myself picking up books in used bookstores on design basics and typesetting practices and papermaking. I see the world a little differently, now that I know where to look. I could talk about how being in fandom often feels like you're a traveler on a long journey, always on the road. You spend a few months in one place, a few years in another; sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I could talk about how fanbinding has made it so that no matter what my newest obsession is, I always have a home to return to--a craft for fandom itself, a craft that's taken me outside fandom, too.
I could talk about how I've fallen in love with writing as craft, writing as a form of connection, all over again. As someone who both writes and binds fanfiction, I know how special it feels to have someone bind your work. My fanbinding energy goes almost exclusively to binding other people's work, and I've only bound my own work twice. But I've also been lucky enough to have had two friends bind my writing, and gosh. Gosh, gosh. Every time, it feels like they've wrapped up my heart so tenderly and given it back to me. I want to give that feeling to every author whose work I've ever bound. A few years back I was able to start offering author copies, and it's honestly been one of the most rewarding things ever, to get to mail someone their own story. This kind of community building--book by book, story by story, is an integral part of why I do this (and also, it's a fun return to the physical roots of modern media fandom). I love making connections with someone over something we both love so much, over a shared act of creation. I love how stories can do that--how they allow you to reach people you never would've reached otherwise.
So I could talk about a lot of things, really. Mostly, though, I just wanted to say thank you--to my friends at Renegade, to every author who's ever written a story I love, to everyone who reads my write-ups and leaves nice comments on my work. I can't tag all of you, otherwise I'd be here all day, but from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you. Thank you so much.
TLDR; Happy five years, yippee!!! I'm so excited to keep making books <3
a year ago the Renegade Retreat was starting
it was a good time with people but a dark & stressful time in life
still hard to fully look back on
highlights remain tablet weaving and seeing books in real life (and walking away with a few of them!)
the calmest, most peaceful memory remains sitting in a hammock reading a book bound by @no-name-publishing
What do you think about rebinding your early ficbinds?
Looking at mine, I see so many mistakes that it makes me want to redo them, but on the other hand, they are a testament to my progress, a constant reminder of what I've learn.
It's not that I'm now an ace at binding, but I have improved. My first binding were lot more crooked, smudged with glue and there is definitely room for better endpaper finishing ... but I'm fond of them.
