A collection of hand bound books created by ML Townsend of Towns End Bindery (@towns_end_bindery on Instagram). I also reblog books I think are pretty.
A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.
Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell
The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words
**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.
A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.
Words honestly can't describe how much this fic means to me, and I had so much fun binding it as a gift for the author 💜 Tuesday's explores such beautiful themes of love - both romantic and platonic, as well as a deep love and appreciation of music - not to mention rockstar shenanigans, grief, loss and recovery. Even though I've read this fic multiple times now, the story and the characters always make me emotional - I *may have* (absolutely did) cry while I was typesetting it! No spoilers but there is a particular scene that gets me every. single. time.
Typeset and handbound by me, for personal use only.
Typeset featuring gorgeous art by @sentient-trash
Dust jacket design and endpapers featuring images and articles from the fic ✨️ **Heads up - dust jacket features some spoilers!!**
Tuesday's Gone With the Wind can be read on Ao3 here
This book has reached its recipient, so I can share pictures now! This is Deadset by @pbaintthetb, an amazing Nie Huaisang fic in which Nie Huaisang is murdered and becomes a tgcf-style ghost.
I did a kintsugi-look binding for a different calamity au (ironically, one in which Jin Guangyao was the ghost) but spoilers, this was the fic that I first thought of using it for. And while my first attempt was just a surface design on the cover, I built this into the structure of the book itself. The cover structure is inspired by Ben Elbel's "pixel binding" which is a book cover made of many tiny squares; using irregular pieces here makes it not quite as flexible, but I'm still very happy with the effect.
The individual sections of the cover were glued to a thin, flexible paper, then covered with a decorative paper that I worked down into the spaces between (definitely use paste rather than pva for this). The gold is deco foil, often called toner-reactive foil but it adheres to dry pva as well, so I simply filled the channels with pva and then applied the foil using the head of a pin to apply pressure (you don't need heat when applying it to pva).
For the rounded spine, I used leather pieces so that I could still have the thickness but they would be flexible enough that I wouldn't have to sacrifice the irregular shapes.
The way Ben Elbel builds his pixel binding books is the textblock is wrapped in a suede cover, basically like a paperback but suede, and then the pixel binding cover is glued to the suede at the spine. I'm not sure that duplicating this construction was necessary here, but it worked out well enough. The suede-covered textblock is an interesting look and feel all by itself actually.
Being into bookbinding while also having ADHD is the WORST. What do you MEAN I have to keep waiting for glue to dry??? I have the project motivation NOW.
This is a Guardian zombie apocalypse AU! I'm using @helle-bored's typeset, which had a very neat stenciled/stamped aesthetic. The binding was loosely inspired by the Antarctic-published books that were bound in boards from wooden crates, but I went my own direction with the concept (in part because I wanted to practice sewing on cord with my sewing frame).
I had originally intended to give the wood a natural grayish weathered look (while I have lots of scrap wood in the basement, I didn't have anything suitable that had been sitting outside for years) but the iron acetate & tea combo that I treated the wood with had a much stronger effect than expected. I'm a fan of how it turned out though!
For the sewing, I referenced Exposed Spine Sewings by Keith Smith, this is a method that uses extra wraps around the cord to climb between signatures instead of a kettle stitch at the head and tail. The cords are laced through the boards and glued down; the furniture tacks are mostly for the aesthetic and only somewhat functional (I pre-drilled the holes they're hammered into because I was worried about the possibility of splitting the wood, so they're not in there as tight as they otherwise could be).
made a book, its kinda fragile, what with the dried leaves and all, but everythings scanned so I'll be experimenting with replicating and maybe selling it locally or something
Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything! I've been doing a lot of nonfanfic projects, which has taken up most of my time (especially because the fanbinds don't usually have deadlines), but I'm finally finding a balance between commissions and personal/fandom projects. For this particular project, I was able to make a copy for both myself and the author.
I've been wanting to bind @arialerendeair's Rewrite the Stars fic for a long time, and now I've finally gotten around to it! I know nothing about figure skating, but this story still managed to captivate me. The art on the front cover is @mayhemspreadingguy's work, and I'm very grateful they allowed me to use it!
I was originally going to try and print the art on Shrinky Dink film, to give it an almost stained-glass appearance, but ended up going with a fake Polaroid look instead (with mixed results: I should have used thicker material so the paper texture wouldn't show through!)
I went with a relatively simple Bradel binding, using leather on the spine but forgoing the traditional corner pieces in favor of metal corner protectors. There's two kinds of shimmery/iridescent paper used for the cover and endpapers, making this a very shiny book, but that works for the figure skating AU!
The typeset is fairly simple: the pair of skates hanging from each chapter title is as fancy as it gets. I tend to make very minimalist typesets because I'm the furthest thing from a graphic designer. That being said, this fic doesn't need a fancy typeset to be fun to read!
Font: Dante 10 + Times New Roman 9.5 for Italics. Typeset by me.
I wanted to read the three Hornblower short stories that are no longer in print. So I made a book. As you would. The stories were arranged in chronological order. Widow McCool and The Last Encounter were threw in to bulk out the book.
The title came from the blurb on the back of the Hornblower books, which always starts with "A Horatio Hornblower Tale of the Sea". I guess it makes these his "Short Tales of the Sea".
Forester allegedly discouraged the republishing of these three short stories. Having read them I understand why. To quote Sean Gilder (who played Styles in the TV series):
"Hornblower, by comparison, is just a series of well-described events"
Sean was comparing Hornblower to Joseph Conrad, which I have not read. But as a Hornblower fan who loves Hornblower for how diabolical he (and the writing) is, it did make me chuckle. The earlier short stories are the pinnacle of "a series of well-described events", that are out of place in the later canon. Though it is interested to see the parallel between The Hand of Destiny and Lieutenant Hornblower.
This is the second time I bound this text. The first attempt was an A5 copy set in Dante 13, which I wasn’t too happy with.
Big book, little book. The big book has too much hinge gap, the little book has just too little. One day I will get it right.
If anyone is looking for a fic rec, The Bare Word (Hornblower/Barry McCool, Explicit) is the perfect companion piece for Hornblower and the Widow McCool, also known as Hornblower's Temptation (this is canon I did not make this up).
Update #1: I finished Notting Hill 🎉 I posted four chapters back-to-back and now it's all out there for you to read! Epilogue and all!
Update #2: I'm nearly finished with my @you-remind-me-of-the-babe's Depth of Reason rebind! I finished the covers and now all I have to do are the finishing touches! But here's a sneak peek:
Update #3: THE BIG UPDATE
I alluded to some big secret potential opportunity that I was being very chill and cool about last week. Well it happened! It's happening!
I'm working with author Alexandra Rowland on their Kickstarter for their new book, Wisdom of Emperors!
More below the cut:
On Saturday morning, hours before I was even awake on the west coast, Alex had posted the handmade luxury editions of the book, and they had sold out by the time I was awake.
Crazy! Exciting! Thrilling! (Scary!)
I was only able to commit to making five of these books, because they are... very elaborate, but after they sold out, Alex asked if I thought I could make any more. After some brainstorming, I agreed to make 10 more books with some alterations.
(There are currently five of those books still available.)
And so begins... The Plan 📝
The Plan for the month of May has ONE step.
Finish reading the manuscript.
It would have (and probably should have) more steps, but I'm going to a wedding and, you may not know this about me, I make most of my own clothes. So I need clothes to wear to the wedding. And that means making them, by June. (Tomorrow, work begins on the pants.)
Anyways, that's all for now!! I will be posting some in progress things for Wisdom of Emperors, so let me know if you'd like me to tag you in those in the future! 🤍
