Things I Draw Go Here

Cheap Paper Art is my website. And this is my AO3.

[thingsidrawgohere]

The typos are one thing. I can live with those jarring uncommon or archaic spellings (ie "dulness") but I simply don't know what to do with "Abelard and Èloise". That's just not her agreed-upon name and it makes my teeth ITCH. I'll leave it; I'll Leave It but I'LL LEAVE IT.

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I have spent an irresponsibly large part of my day formatting a huge-ass table from the book and now I need to redo it because I really should make it themed. Oh, What Have I Done? It's taken me days to just get 70 pages into this ~350 page typeset. I am a thunderous dipshit.

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I'm reading a fic set in NYC. The characters got on the 4 but got off on Canal Street. This reminds me of my six interminable months of jury duty. It's winter; I'm climbing out of Canal, up to Centre Street, with all the people who seem to belong to the world, and I'm resigned to exist in the liminality of dreading every other day- one day there, one day waiting to be there- climbing out of Canal, up to Centre Street, climbing out and up, out and up, until the dread is climbing up with me, as me, wearing my clothes, walking my boots.

I don't think the 4 stops at Canal during the weekday.

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Here's the Dead Men book. I wanted to try using photo-collage engraving for the texture (most of which is lost in the photos) and I'm not terribly pleased with the results. But! Some very happy mistakes.

The boards are- boards. Straight davey, engraved via laser. I sealed them with spray sealant to protect the images and keep the PVA glue from darkening the board. The glue was used to give the toner foil something to grab and the foil was chaotic in its will, going where it wished, a beast with no master. Good thing I'm into it. The story titles in the text block are similarly foiled.

A rasp was lightly pressed into the block edges to create a pore-like texture. There's a whole bone thing happening with the text block but it's subtle. I will not be subtle with motif in the next book.

(These next two images are gifs.)

And here's the three fics on Ao3 if one is interested.

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Now this author has my attention- he's an American pastor quoting Marx in 1921, post-Russian Revolution. For a book initially chosen for laughs (and one I'll need to read thoroughly for damned setting- So Many Typos), I'm suddenly piqued.

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God, here we go again. I'm typesetting another old book and the copyright has a typo. Printed in the fine state of "Iliinois". This... does not bode well.

I really don't want to make note of every sic but it's the Printing! Notice! In a book I'm! Printing! University of Chicago Press, you're murdering me.

Edit: Yep. I'm going to have to re-edit this whole thing. The OCR is garbage. Every carriage return is saved in the text on top of the general optical errors. 🎶 I'm gonna have to touch Every Line.🎶

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Well. It happened again. I saw the fandom making an interesting case for Project Hail Mary and I figured Sure, Why Not? I thought The Martian was libertarianism verging on movie as told by the embodiment of low-fat ranch, fifty-nine open tabs, and defunding the humanities- but let's see!

And, as is often the case, the fandom has been... generous in its interpretation. I would love to know if there's a word for this collective hallucinatory phenomenon cuz it's gotten me multiple times. Fanon Fugue?

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I'm trying very hard to talk myself out of this ribbon as a bookmark for the Dead Men book. It doesn't work at all with the palette nor the book size nor the vibe but- Look At It. My man's jiggling for the back seats.

I shouldn't. I won't. But I want to. Winsomeness is an endless misery.

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I know people are into Garfield but I would posit, no, insist Heathcliff is being slept on. Surely the youth yearn for that dank stuff? The icky and the sticky of a world so fallen that even percipience shuns it.

Heathcliff.

HEATHCLIFF.

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I have learned that fans of the Project Hail Mary movie are increasingly shipping Ken with Markiplier, a man from an unrelated movie.

Life really does find a way.

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As there isn't an official one, I've decided to make myself an Ao3 t-shirt. I don't have any screen print emulsion at the mo' but I do have a baby plotter and an ungodly amount of vinyl. See where I'm going?

This is actually vinyl transfer tape. It's low tack enough to not mar the fabric when removed but sticky enough to dam the ink. It's also gridded and that really helps with any counters that need to be placed free-hand. And! It's somewhat reusable. I got two pulls from this stencil and perhaps could have gotten a third if needed. There is some very minor leakage but not bad for being wildly outside of its use case.

(To address the obvious question, I must admit I kinda hate the Ao3 logo. It's kicky, don't get me wrong, but god- you'd think it was a Norwegian metal band given its intelligibility. This is a simple, side-step design that I've used before.)

Definitely doing this again. I wonder how multiple colors would look.

Edit: I placed the design too high on the torso! Which I, Clearly, Notably, did on purpose to display my humility before the universe.

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Oh! The absolutely best thing about 'Bumtickler' is the character names- which should cool one's expectations. It really is a dire condemnation of period smut. But like- tag yourself?

Some characters do return in Hotten's other offerings. Nick Fury steps from the shadows.

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The gag for these books is fairly straightforward. I wanted 'respectable' outside with a secret naughty inside. Noting groundbreaking. As I don't have a way to foil emboss, I used laser engraving to mar the leather. The inside book was satin fabric and paper with a touch of leather on the hinge.

But what I Shoulda done was bind the little book and rigged it so it could be housed tidily as a separate piece. Maybe kept it attached with a ribbon or chain (ala the telephone books in ye olde phone booths). Coulda maintained more control over everything that way. What I Did was get fixated on the two books sharing a contiguous spine. Which is why the little book's text block is messy and its 'case' is uneven. I wanted a very slight round so I built a jig out of waste davey to hold the little pages square but I needed to remove the jig to round. Thus the block is sigogglin and the case, needing to be placed after rounding, sits like a hernia. Learn from me.

Given this structure, I went with split boards for strength. But I wanted a lighter leather for the spine. I figured I'd stick the spine in with the text block and the next obvious concern was the amount of bacon I'm trying to wedge between the boards. So I ditched my original plan to use a cutout on the cover for the title leather. Went with an inset. After engraving, I was too nervous to thin the title leather and now, there's this unsightly raised edge. Ugh. Also try desperately to ignore that inexplicably different comma. I am.

Not done being off center, I failed to pre-curve my spine cover piece. I figured since it was a minor curve, I could form it while attaching. This was baby idiot behavior. I've never done this style of spine before so I get some grace but I Knew Better. Began a cascade of problems. My too-flat spine piece was not centered appropriately, thus my placement for the f/b cover boards were off plumb, thus the front hinge is oversized. Book stands wide. Shoulda put shoulders on the goddamned thing at this rate. Learn From Me!

And the fore edge is too damned big. This is a continual problem with me. I design these cases forgetting the width of the hinge and dive into the build until I'm at a point wherein I'm hesitant to start over for 1/8" of extra fore edge. LEARN!

The outside book endpapers, while beautiful, were a bear. Too thin so I needed to tea dye some lining paper and the damned stuff Still wrinkled. I must have made three different sets of endpapers and it looked fine before going into the press. Every One wrinkled.

Not bad, not great. But Done!

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Here's the second edition (1860) version of John Camden Hotten's "A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words". A contemptuous book that seems to take no pleasure in novel wordcraft. Nor its kin in scholarship (his bibliography is rife with bitching about the quality of his sources- which... Same?) Now, what's interesting is that Hotten, unlike the venerable Grose, did not include 'smutty' slang in his dictionary, writing in 'Slang's foreword:

But- Oh. What's this?

Why, it's Hotten's 'found' and anonymously published "Lady Bumtickler's Revels", his 1872 'comic opera' about sexualized spanking. (He blamed this book upon a then-30-year-dead historian, Henry Buckle. An undeniable dick move.) I put a book in your book so you book while you book.

While not explicit along most vectors, this little fella is an odd dead dove: dominating women who love to beat children, lesbianism, a staggering amount of incestual leanings, deeply icky coquettes, child abuse, everybody abuse, bad poetry, a society that, Pokemon-like, seems to revolve around whippings, unforgivable tedium, perfunctory music, and, obviously, sadomasochism. With a side of long-s abuse, as Hotten apparently claimed the piece was from the 1770s (perhaps meant as a further joke... 'joke'). The poor printing reflects the haste- or 'hafte'- at which this horrid little thing was kicked out the door. Typos abound. (Reader, those I left. I corrected the OCR scan issues.)

Upon my honour, I find it extremely un-arousing and Exponentially un-comic the longer it goes on but, upon my honour, I'm not a certain 'London Antiquary' (my honour? upon it.) All the same, 'Lady Bumtickler' is only Part of Hotten's erotic publishing, as it is third in his 'Library Illustrative of Social Progress' series (all on 'flagellation'). He didn't write them all, often acting as a simple publisher (or dubious re-publisher). Here's his smutty offerings for sale in the back of 'Bumtickler'.

When the second of two sentences in one's Wikipedia blurb is entirely devoted to "clandestine publishing of numerous erotic and pornographic titles", it's more difficult to sell "a want of decency is a want of sense."

Build information in another post.

Here's the Project Gutenberg for Slang and the Archive of Bumtickler.

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I discovered that if one is repeatedly bad at applying toner foil, it produces a very nice craquelure effect. (Second image is to keep the gif from being too big and also THAT'S how it's spelled what the hell what the fuck.)

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Say- Am I the only one who, upon typing A O 3 for any reason, gets the chorus to The Beastie Boys' 1998 track, 'Super Disco Breakin', stuck in their head? Every time? I mean, like, Every Time?

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No one? No one at all? Whither has my money makers, money money makers hied?

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There's a very high likelihood that no one will ever see this back cover in situ. A bummer since I liked how the design came out but, then again, it was always headed for a shelf in my craft room. Gloria, mundi, etc.

Then double again, no one is going to see the nasty nasty no good horror show of my sewing. I had a plan; I did! But reality intervened and I am allowed the kindness of carrying my dogshit spaghetti sewing, unseen, to the grave. Truly the sic-est of transit, cousin.