This book was a first for me in many ways. First off it's rounded! Which I have never successfully done before (and, many of you may argue, still have not done). This is also my first non-fanfiction bind, but was still hand typeset by me because of the many, many annotations I included in the text. That is my favorite part of this book, so I'm gonna show it off a bit.
For instance, those of you who have read Game of Kings, did you know that when Lymond made an offhand reference to a beaver he was talking about how he wasn't going to chew off his own testicles, as people in that time believed beavers did? Well, maybe you would know that if you read the excellent Ultimate Guide to Game of Kings by Laura Ramsey, which is where I got nearly all of these annotations from. But it was so frustrating going back and forth between the book and the guide book, and so I just decided to combine the two.
More info under the cut.
The other opportunity typesetting this thing gave me was the ability to add pictures and fancy text, which honestly may have taken more time to pick out than the actual annotations.
The book is separated into four parts, and each part got a full page illustration as seen in the middle picture. The ends of the chapters (if there was space) got a little illustration, mostly of Scotland or pretty English castles. I tried to choose pictures of places that I recognized from the book, but a lot of times prettiness won over accuracy. All images were found on the Internet Archive and printed on my poor little Brother printer. Some are blurry because the source material wasn't great, but most are blurry because my printer isn't great.
The endpapers (which I'm not 100% happy with, they were just printed at a FedEx store and I don't love the paper) are by Scottish artist Alexander Nasmyth. He lived a few hundred years after Lymond but I figured it was okay because I'm not Dorothy Dunnett and I don't care about historical accuracy that much and they are very, very pretty. I don't remember what the first one is but it's a ruined castle and water, so it's good enough for me. The second one is a distant view of Stirling (mileage will vary on exactly HOW distant, as it's barely noticeable) but I just had to put that one in there.
The back cover. Each book will have a different quote (they're all picked out except Checkmate....we'll see if I even get to that book ha ha) but of course this was the easy pick for book 1. And my Imp press logo underneath it!
The spine. Everything was done with HTV as always, although idk if it was the bookcloth or what but this one went down easy. I had hardly any problems at all.
Oh and the title page! With ink reactive gold foil accents.
And because I love sharing my mistakes here's a little bit of the stuff I messed up on:
OMG you guys cutting this thing was a nightmare. I forced my bf to make me a book plough because my guillotine was NOT nearly big enough to cut this behemoth and buying a book plough online is very expensive?! And it went....okay. It was fine. Nerve wracking and the blade needs to be sharpened and I have no idea how to do that but fine. As you can see the pages didn't come out super smooth or even--I think next time I'm going to try sanding A LOT--but it was fine. And the swell on this thing was INSANE. You can probably tell by how curvy it is. I don't know if this is an acceptable amount of swell? Or if I should have used a smaller thread? But it worked out I think, and it feels good in hand and it opens great so I'm very happy with it overall.
The other mess up....we'll see if you can even notice it.
Yeah I don't think you can even see it! You can barely see it in person, really you can only feel it if you run your fingers across the cover. BUT what happened was that when I was putting on the HTV I (so, so stupidly) forgot to weed out the middle part of the O in 'OF'. I tried scraping it off and made it so so much worse. So eventually I just printed out another O in HTV and put it on a scrap piece of bookcloth. Then I (or...I made my bf do it ha ha) verrrrry carefully cut around the outside of the O and we just stuck the whole thing on top of the bad, ruined one. And it worked really well!! Which is good because I was NOT making that stupid cover again. But once it was pressed down you can hardly see it. And does it look like the front cover is uneven by about 2mm between the bottom and top? No it doesn't I don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway, I will talk about this thing until the end of time I'm so happy with it! If anyone has any questions or wants more pictures or ANYTHING I will be so happy to oblige. This book is filled with SO many references and so many foreign languages and reading it while being able to understand all of them is a different experience. My biggest takeaway from a lot of this was that while Lymond does love referencing specifically John Mandeville and Roger Ascham A LOT he also references a lot of common songs and nursery rhymes and lines from popular plays. What I'm saying is that if Lymond were alive today he'd be quoting Marvel movies and Seinfeld.
We Are All Diamonds by Footloose (@insanewordcount)
Date Completed: 2/9/2025
Size: Half Letter Folio. 134,304 words, 417 pages.
Copies: 1
6th Book of Binderary
This is a modern Merlin AU where Arthur is a deaf Canadian diamond merchant and Merin is strong-armed by his neighbor into moonlighting as a sign language interpreter. Plus some opera world stuff, corporate takeovers, and general skullduggery with magic thrown into the mix. I was going to make a vaguely sophisticated book with sheet music decorative paper to keep with the musical theme, but then I stumbled across the double sided tessellated papers in my stash (another creative-reuse store find) and it turned into something amazingly colorful and loud.
Typeset in LibreOffice Writer (like all my fanbindings so far) with Garamond as the body text and Caslon/CaslonSwash for titles. My typesets have been very plain thus far, so I went out on a limb with a dingbat font called Honeymoon to give a little pizzazz to the chapter headings. Wild, I know.
This was my first time making a book with a rounded spine and I am very pleased with the results. It was incredibly strange to beat my textblock with a hammer, but you can’t argue with the results. It gives the whole thing a more “book” feel than a lot of my flatback binds have managed to achieve. Looking forward to making a lot more with this technique. I have a tiny hammer and I can’t wait to use it!
I have made a few copies of this bind, but not one for myself yet, so I decided not only would I make one, but since it was only for me, I'd try spine rounding for the first time.
It went…fine. I can see how it might drive me insane in the future because it's hard to get even and then my fore edges ended up being too large because it's hard to measure the boards. Or something. Anyway, I'll probably do it again with a larger book, one of the big chonks of a 200k fic or something.
If I was smart I'd have foiled the spine BEFORE I rounded it but apparently I am not smart. So.
And then I went and spent $20 getting a dust jacket printed and now you can't really even tell. (But I bought a wide format printer so now I can print my own!)
