I bound a little copy of The Witch's Cat by Champagne / @temporalreplicsimile! The story was the perfect opportunity to try my first buttonhole binding and I love the result. It's such a fun structure!
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@tinwhiskerpress
I bound a little copy of The Witch's Cat by Champagne / @temporalreplicsimile! The story was the perfect opportunity to try my first buttonhole binding and I love the result. It's such a fun structure!
This bind is probably my best example of "Everything that could go wrong... but it's fine in the end" so far.
For the 2025 Renegade Typesetting Exchange, @tinwhiskerpress made a typeset of my favourite Klapollo fanfiction, Words Come Fluently by ItsyRoyal. It's a music industry AU with tons of social media elements and a healthy dose of the secret/mistaken identity trope. And finally, here it is, all bound and ready to go on my shelf!
Except it was an adventure and a half to reach this state.
affirmations for my printer:
you are not out of paper
you have so much paper
it’s okay to function as intended
you are not out of ink
i just refilled that cartridge last month
you can connect to that computer you’re supposed to connect to
you’re allowed to print things
Natural history for the use of schools and families. 1864. Book cover.
Internet Archive
Free Ornamentation II. This work is dedicated to the public domain.
Fanbinds for Zulu
It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
printers behave like that because the medieval monks they put out of work are haunting them
Honestly good for them.
The monks I meant, but the printers too I suppose. They'd love having an excuse to be terrible and inconvenient.
I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!
(which you can listen to here on archive.org)
This is my first time doing a buttonhole stitch binding. Most examples I saw were blank notebooks, and had decorative sheets wrapped fully around the outside of each section of paper, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the text, so I just pasted a thin strip of the marbled paper down to the outer fold edge of each section.
In the 1830s, such books were very popular, as they showed the reader amazing 3D projections.
Honestly, this impresses me infinitely more than the snazziest 3D CGI imagery Hollywood can come up with.
another bind done! this was a really fun project for @szfiction of her dr. stone ryukasa fic people like you (always want what they can't have). its a faux 3-piece bradel with cutouts well worth the time, made as thanks for zed's endless patience while ive been in accident recovery.
Exchange 2025: Cat Scratch Fever
Every year I put down "any anime" on my list of what I'll bind for the Renegade exchange - I'm not quite brave enough to go fully fandom blind but anime is a big umbrella. This year I ended up with an anime I followed ages ago but hadn't thought much about in years: Bleach.
Cat Scratch Fever takes place well post-canon and one of the defining details is Ichigo learning from Yoruichi the secrets of becoming a cat. He then spends a good bit of the plot as a big orange cat.
Orange cat transformation? I can do that.
another bind done! this was a really fun project for @szfiction of her dr. stone ryukasa fic people like you (always want what they can't have). its a faux 3-piece bradel with cutouts well worth the time, made as thanks for zed's endless patience while ive been in accident recovery.
fonts will be named shit like viscera antique, 16 bit dreams, doctor's orders, bingo condensed, googly, wish you were here
Posts that made me open my art program and find all the fonts with my favorite names bc yeah this isn't inaccurate.
(Names are all also written in alt text)
Binding my own work, for once (starting a series!)
So far, I have bound comparatively little of my own work (x, x, x, x), and half the time when I have it's been because someone else asked for it or somebody made cool art. But as my writing productivity has slowed to a crawl (at best), I can admit that the grand majority of what I've written is not going to get added to, and therefore I can bind it without worry.
And suddenly I had a vision. After so many years of Obiyuki AU bingo summers and my own occasional wild ideas, I have a lot of sci-fi AUs built up.
Watchtower
Ever since I started binding books, I have gotten a little predictable with birthday presents. This year was a milestone birthday for a friend who'd written an epic I'd been looking forward to binding and finally decided my skills and tools were ready. I'm still leery of curved spines but I'm getting better at them bit by bit.
The initiating story, The Watchtower, has a definite note of The Yellow Wallpaper to its plot, so the moment I saw this yellow-orange moire bookcloth, I knew it was meant to be.
The Beast With The Beautiful Face
This book, the work of several years by @traditional-with-a-twist, was a reward for their having won the kitty in Obiyuki Madness a couple of years ago. I was happy to hold off until they finished.
But then I couldn't decide what to do with the cover, and since I was making two copies, I figured I'd try new things. 1) a new bookcloth I hadn't tried before, and 2) a half binding with corners.
crazy how the printer is the only piece of tech that acts up like that almost every day of its life. and we just accept it
i don't think i've ever met a printer that actually wanted to be a printer. i think most printers have dreams of being on the stage
I met a printer early in my IT career that did not want to be a printer. it sat in a school reprographics room, sullenly chewing any job it was fed - if it deigned to notice them at all.
then one day, a miracle occurred. an exhausted physics teacher, instead of punching in 12 for the number of copies she wanted of the 30-page booklet she had made for her A-level physics class, punched in 1200.
and that printer came to life. this print job was its moment, its magnum opus! it WOULD NOT be parted from it, no matter what we did, until we physically unplugged it from the wall, by which time it had printed almost 200 copies.
moral of the story: no printer wants to be a printer, unless you also do not want it to be a printer for a bit.
ohhhhh i can picture this so clearly