and thus I rise from the dead (with no new fics of my own making though). Anyway, I'm gonna talk a bit about my process binding Salvage by @muffinlance. Thanks @necrotic-bones for (unknowingly) inspiring me to get into this (they were to first to ask to fanbind Salvage and I wanted to do it as well)
Before I begin, here are the guides/tutorials that I used:
- How To Make A Book From An AO3 Page by @armoredsuperheavy
- Bookbinding Resources Master List by members of the Renegade Bindery discord server (found through the previous guide)
- r/bookbinding has a nice beginner’s introduction to bookbinding
- the Case Bound Book series by DAS Bookbinding on youtube is very helpful as well, I specifically used Part 6 Casing In
I also found this amazing program, called Bookbinder (on quantumelephant.co.uk), that takes your pdf and formats it into proper signatures and flips every second page for you etc, so that you can print it at home (if you have the proper printer for it)
this post is probably going to be kind of long, so the entire thing is under the cut, but here’s a preview:
Anyway, I think it's been close to over two weeks since the start of my bookbinding projects, but they’re both done! I first did a kind of test run with a collection of detroit become human fanfics, which taught me four things:
- don't forget to choose natural white paper at the print shop (books never use pure white paper)
- the edges will be irregular and that is ok, do under no circumstances try to level them by hand as you will definitely not succeed in getting smooth edges, just leave the signatures as they are, trust me
- thin endpapers are horrible to smoothly glue down, so take some paper that's a bit thicker and it'll be easier
- finish watching a tutorial before doing the thing, eg. I forgot to put extra paper between the endpapers and the first two and last two pages of the DBH collection got a bit of a wave now, oh well
I might make another post properly detailing my first fanbinding journey with the DBH fics, but second things first: Salvage
Chapter 1: The Beginning
I did dip my toes into bookbinding a few years back, but did them japanese style with an open spine, so doing a proper case bookbind with a spine and all was new to me, ArmoredSuperHeavy’s guide helped a lot
Chapter 2: Getting Materials
Step 1: Read both guides mentioned above, then go to the city to find what you need, don't really find what you need, order a bunch of shit instead
Step 2: Only partially read through the bookbinding guide and forget to order half the stuff you need, try to make do with what you have (big mistake)
Step 3: Try to make bookcloth yourself with this guide, don’t follow it properly and fail at making it, find out that buying bookcloth is dirt cheap (comparatively)
Step 4: regret buying all that cloth and unnecessarily expensive thin paper for the backing
Step 4: buy cheap bookcloth while sighing through the pain of being inconvenienced by your own stupidity, patiently wait for all of your stuff to arrive
Step 5: harvest and format your choosen works according to @armoredsuperheavy‘s guide, run it through the bookbinder program
Step 6: let a website print your script for you since your printer is barely good enough to print one (1) page if you’re lucky, let alone 64 (DBH) or flippin’ 103 (Salvage), front and back
Step 7: wait some more
Chapter 3: Binding the Book
Now sadly I barely took any pictures (read: none), except for the finished product, so I wont go into too much detail, I’ll mostly talk about my thoughts behind choosing the colors and design with a slight detour into the layout and formatting of the fic
The Design:
I knew that I wanted the book to be blue (since Salvage takes place at sea) and that I wanted to find some paper that had some kind of blue wave design on it, I went on ollilypaperware and found this really nice chiyogami paper with a blue wave/scale design on it:
I wanted the round parts to point upwards, but I got it all turned around while glueing it down and now they point downwards instead, but thats fine
I wanted the spine to be blue as well, but when I looked at my red bookcloth (I ordered a few different colors since shipping was a bit expensive and I wanted to get my money’s worth) and thought “red like fire, oh OH that would look fucking awesome and reflect the content of the fic much better”, so I used that instead, I also bought some blue, purple and yellow ribbons in the city and used the blue one for a bookmark by gluing it into the spine
Because of that I made a kind of template, I used Baskerville Old Face for the body, Garamond for the front matter (AO3 tags, summary etc) and Bodoni MT for the front title and chapter titles
The Formatting:
Now I did format a few works before ordering the materials, the materials were getting quite expensive and I wanted to make sure that I had more than just one fic I wanted to bind, I made a whole list and all
I pretty much just followed SuperArmoredHeavy’s guide on how to harvest and format AO3 fics and my layout is the same, meaning the first page is just the title, then title and author in bigger font with the AO3 tags and the summary on the back, then the fic and lastly the author’s notes in an appendix
Chapter 4: The Finished Book
My trial run was a great success in terms of learning what to do and what not to, which means that my Salvage fanbind is the best it could be (except for the endpaper at the back, which I slightly failed at gluing down smoothly, but its behind two empty pages and at the end of the book, so I dont really mind, no one will see)
I’m incredibly happy with the finish and hope that the exterior does the interior justice, but without much further ado, here are the promised pictures:
I decided I want to document my first attempt at fanbinding the fantastic ATLA fic “Salvage” by @muffinlance. I’ll be reblogging this post with all my updates. Here’s the first!
Day 0: supplies have been ordered and I’ve done frantic googling on how the hell am I supposed to format this for printing. I’ve come to the conclusion I’ll have to take the pdf of the fic, transfer it to a doc to remove the author’s notes and add page numbers, turn it into a pdf again to run through a program that will format it for me and then print it. Tomorrow tho, it’s too late for that tonight
