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.
This is possibly the most time consuming project I’ve ever worked on. The moment I thought I was done, some other idea would come up and the work would continue. That was how the process felt with this piece.
Photos of the book itself can be found in this post. The crown foil on the protective board piece came from Fable and Bind. The maps are from the 2011 Batnum Books Trade Paperback Edition of Game of Thrones. All other art is my own original design.
This was my first time making a box on my own. Before this, I had only ever made a clamshell box in a workshop at the International Printers Museum.
@artsyunderstudy made three new art pieces for this fic which are absolutely STUNNING
I had the absolute joy and honor of pairing with @artsyunderstudy to bind this stunning fic by and for @cutestkilla! 🧡
Main typeface: Averia Serif
Title/Chapter font: Freehand Blockletter
Bookcloth: Duo Brick
Vinyl: Siser Gold, Cricut Foil in Bronze and Rose Gold, Cricut Iron On in Oyster and Wine
Paper: Church Paper Short Grain 24lb Opaque Vanilla
Cut with a Cricut Maker, applied with Cricut Heat Press, and printed on a Brother Laser L2460 Printer and Epson Inkjet 3830 Printer
The back cover design is based on this lovely art by @artsyunderstudy
A new day and a new book! Today I've got a single-author anthology to share with you. This is a collection of shorter Good Omens fics by Kedreeva, whose work I have bound a couple of times before. They've left the fandom (so don't go bugging them about it) but their fics are still up and they always meant a lot to me, so I collected some of them (not all, just my favorites) for my own offline collection.
For the cover we have allure book cloth in a pale lavender shade (it's called Wisteria) and lineco dark gray on the spine. The accent strip is chiyogami from a random scrap pack, with cranes in flight in shades of purple and gold. And we have gold HTV for the title. I made the ring of feathers from a free asset from the Noun Project. A lot of the fics I chose are wingfics, and many of them portray asexual relationships, so feathers, birds, and ace pride colors are a recurring theme.
Have a look under the cut for more!
Quick pic of the spine, nothing really unconventional there. It is hard restraining myself and putting things in simple fonts, but I have to admit it does make spine titling easier. And we have ace pride flag endbands, handmade double core with a plain black ribbon for the bookmark. The flags are kind of annoying to do; there is some math involved in getting the color changes in the right places. I like how they look, here and in the other books I've done them for, but I'm not sure it's worth it unless it really hits the theme like this one. They're perfect here though.
Renato Crepaldi marbles for the endpapers, ace pride color edition. I bought these quite a while ago without a clear idea of which project I was going to use them for. They're perfect for this one, in color and in shape. The marbling can sort of suggest feathers, and the swirls can be a sort of stylized wing shape, like the cranes on the cover.
Same feather graphic on the title page and table of contents that I used on the cover. It pleases me to no end that I got the contents to sit inside it. Don't strain your eyes trying to read them; I've got links at the end of the post. The extra feathers in the middle of the title page are something I put together years ago to be a scene break divider in another fic. It didn't work so well there, being too detailed and visually heavy, but being slightly grayed out and enlarged made it perfect for the title page. And a really simple layout for the interior, retaining all the summaries.
Overall I am very pleased with this one, if in a sort of quiet way. It's not loud and it's only a little elaborate but I feel like I chose well to suit the contents of the stories. It's understated but it's rich. It's exactly as it should be.
And to close out, here are the links:
Birds of a Feather, a collection of short fics and the one I chose for the title, because I thought it made the most sense with the theming
You're the Only Prayer I Need, wings and also scales
A Sky Full of Stars, beautiful and unique setting
A Little Less Celestial, some sleepy non-sexual intimacy
Just One Yesterday, a time loop story
Brand New Feeling, they go to the beach
And A Nightingale Sang, they go to the Ritz for the first time
When in Rome, a two-part historical interlude
(Not Just) Any Port in a Storm, the only sexy one in the bunch, though a very asexual kind of sexy
Symmetry in Favor, a 5+1 fic
Of Firsts and Foremosts, an ancient history fic
Binary Stars, a pre-fall fic
Like a River Flows, a memory loss story
The Loneli(ness) of a Wild Loch, in which Crowley is Nessie
This is possibly the most time consuming project I’ve ever worked on. The moment I thought I was done, some other idea would come up and the work would continue. That was how the process felt with this piece.
Photos of the book itself can be found in this post. The crown foil on the protective board piece came from Fable and Bind. The maps are from the 2011 Batnum Books Trade Paperback Edition of Game of Thrones. All other art is my own original design.
This was my first time making a box on my own. Before this, I had only ever made a clamshell box in a workshop at the International Printers Museum.
I had a couple of ideas already in mind for this fic. I originally liked the idea of a female shadow looking into a broken mirror and seeing a bloody ‘evil’ Sasuke. The other idea was to have a female sasuke (already had a pic though couldn’t find the original) and have a shadow of sasuke in the background. Neither of which I ended up using as I didn't like the way it was turning out at the beginning so I decided to start completely over. I had a look at the images I already had saved in my random art folder and saw an image of a younger cut dark haired girl surrounded by dark figures. I couldn't find the artist anywhere but really like the pencil effect
I liked the colour palette and decided to erase her eyes to instead have sharigan in them. I added some shadow behind the text for the title and author name which I really like the font choices of. I am not 100% sure about what I want to do with the back as i want to keep it super simple; on one version I just have the text in loopy writing in the same red as the sharingan eyes and then the others having the same background of the surrounding faces around an arched box with the summary inside.
Cannot stop makes little things! These wee books have flower illustrations on their covers, floral embroidery on their spines and a tiny seed packet pocket inside.
Mandalorian - They're Gonna Give You Hell by unlimitedInk
For my mandalorian covers, I am keeping (so far atleast) to a specific format with the same fonts, locations of text, background shadows behind the text and art from the tv series end credits. I went through the art from the series to find an art piece that I like for the fic which I then added to the cover background as a full wrap. I added a black rectangle over the top to change the colour by editing the transparency. I then duplicated the image and removed the background to have just Mando in front of the square so he is slightly more ‘vibrant’, I added some shadow between him and the background with a little ‘The One True Cheesealor’ by his helmet. On the wall, I added a one colour, blurred, mostly transparent copy of Mando as his shadow with a little floating crown (also one colour, blurred, mostly transparent to look like part of the shadow) and finally i found an image of the darksaber with the handle as a shadow and the blade as a light white coloured glowing shadow. I also have a version where the crown is normal grey metal over his helmet. The cover took me 20 minutes to create.
This is Part 2 of my tutorial on how to make a slipcase.
Part 1 how to measure and put the slipcase together
Part 2 is how to put the cloth onto the case
For this slipcase, I made my own bookcloth by printing on 185gsm cotton canva and use heat n bond + tissue paper to back it with paper. I will make a separate tutorial on how I set up my files for wrap cover and then get my stuff printed.
Make sure that your cloth is enough to fully wrap around the slipcase, and has enough excess to cut out pieces for the top bottom part.
I start by gluing down one side to the cloth. Make sure there is enough excess fabric to fold the cloth over the board into the inside of the case
and then apply glue the cloth to the spine, and then over on the other side. Make sure to go over the cloth with your bone folder to make sure it is properly sticking to the boards, and then wait for the glue to dry.
After that, it's time to start trimming off the excess cloth.
in DAS video tutorial, he shows you how to trim cloth for the top and bottom pieces in a way that glues together seamless and has no cloth overlapping each other. I don't do that because that is too much precise measurement for me and I don't mind the overlapping too much.
along cloth of the long edge, I use a pencil to draw a square of the same thickness as the board (2.5mm)
I do this so that when I fold the cloth other, it doesn't get scrunched up in the corner. Especially with my DIY cloth, the material is thicker than normal purchased bookcloth, I do this. Sometimes I'm lazy and skip this step when I make a bookcloth with book cloth that I purchased
I measure out the center point of the long edge and glue the ribbon to the paper-backed side of the cloth. It's admittedly not the most secure method, as the constant pulling on it over time could make the cloth detach from the board. It's probably better to have the ribbon be put inside the board, buuuut I have not tried that out myself yet
side note make sure you replace the blade tip regularly lol
I glue down the cloth on the top and bottom part like this:
The next step is cuttig out cloth pieces to glue to the top and bottom part of the slipcase to cover up the seams. This is the part where I kind of just skip the measuring. I place the slipcase on the cloth and then use a pencil to trace the outline with a pencil. However, when I cut the piece I don't cut it exactly along the pencil line, I move the ruler 1-2mm to the inside along the long edge on both sides and then cut it.
The reason I do this is that I don't want the top/bottom pieces to be the exact width on the slipcase, rather it's few mm shorter (see picture). and also make sure you have excess flaps to turn it over and glue it to the inside of the case
trim the excess flap and then glue it to the inside of the case. Make sure to go over with the bone folder to press the cloth down properly.
and with that, you've made a slipcase for your book!
I hope it's not too difficult to follow along :) I don't consider myself an expert in any way, and I'm sure there are plenty of other more qualified bookbinders who do some steps differently or can explain it better <3
Bound: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) + about today by @corvidcordelia
Look, I'm a sucker for a Jane Austen AU, and in the Heated Rivalry fandom, I really love non-Hockey AUs, so this Pride & Prejudice/authors AU was right up my alley. And oh my, it's so wonderful. I knew as I was reading it that I was going to want to bind it.
(in case you were wondering, I'm team 1995)
The series of these two fics is "the thing perhaps is to eat flowers and not to be afraid", which comes from an e.e. cummings poem. Which is why there's an entire poem on the title page.
Okay, so. I had this gorgeous red paper I bought in Washington last month, and it paired gorgeously with this red bookcloth I recently bought. So I was going to use the foil quill to put the title on, but the text just came out blobby, so I had to think of something else. Skivertex to the rescue! I swear that stuff is magic when it comes to foil quill.
I also was inspired by @maleekamolscreates's use of labels on a recent bind for the titles, and I kind of took that further by extending the "label" across the entire cover. I really love how it came out! I had this vision of an apple on the cover, but it wasn't working for me, so I decided to keep it simple and nixed the apple.
I kept the typeset fairly simple, but it was fun adding in some photographs that were in the text of the fic. I did at least get to use the apple motif in the section dividers.
When it came time (like, the next day) to make my own copy, I went with a different color scheme because I didn't have enough of the red paper. So I used this gorgeous marbled paper that Mally made and went with blue instead of red on the cover. The colors of the endbands and edge speckles come from the endpapers, but I think it's kind of hard to tell. (Also I'm mad at myself for forgetting to speckle the edges of the author copy.)
I don't ever expect anything in return for binding an author's story (in fact, I'm the one giving them something in return for writing a brilliant story so this could end up being like sending thank you notes for thank you notes) but nevertheless I screamed like a little girl when I got a notification about this, which features one of my favorite tropes (pining while fucking.) I'm so excited to read it!
Today's books look a bit plain, but they feel really good to handle. This is Music and Manuscripts by CynSyn and it was so long I had to split it into two volumes. It is a Good Omens human!AU that last updated in 2020. Mind the tags if you go for this one. It is unfinished, and both our leads go through some really dark places. They do come out the other side before the final update, but it is a long journey to get there and you can tell reading it that there were further plans that never reached fruition. In spite of those things it is absolutely worth your time and will consume your week if you let it.
So! Up there we have Japanese book cloth, I think in marine blue, on the spine and fore edge. It doesn't photograph well (too shiny, almost iridescent) and is a little more muted in person. The strip down the center is scrapbook paper with musical notation and I have had it so long I've forgotten where it came from. Both of these were bought for other projects that were scrapped (the cloth for a public domain bind, the paper for god knows what, it was before I started bookbinding and I only had one (torn) 12x12" sheet of it). I am really pleased with how well they came together, considering. It looks like I planned it from the start, and yet when I originally conceptualized this bind it was green with intricate marbled insets. Amazing.
More photos under the cut!
Really quick image of the backs, because I want to mention structure. The paper has an extra strip of thin chipboard under it, so that section is a little raised, and the cloth rests right at the edge. This makes the cover materials nearly flush and will hopefully reduce wear when I'm putting them on and off the shelves. I've done this before and always feel extremely clever for doing it but it's invisible in photos.
Ok, spines and endbands time:
We have gold foil HTV on the spine and handmade endbands in an alternating blue-gold-black pattern. I mentioned above that this fic is unfinished, and as I've said many times I usually do unfinished fics as glueless binds, coptic or occasionally crisscross. A couple of factors went into the decision to do these as case binds, but the most prevalent one was length. This fic stands at 232k words. The combined page count is well over 700. You simply can't do that in a glueless bind without having the most egregious spine swell in existence. I had to be able to round them. I did consider doing one cased and one coptic, but in the end it was more important to me that they matched. In the unlikely (in this case) event that the fic ever gets continued, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. With much celebrating and a little consternation, because I have more cloth but I probably can't get any more of the paper.
I actually went with a plain, understated endpaper for these. It's tan lokta, no frills. The contrast with the cover paper isn't as pronounced as this in real life. I didn't want the endpapers to compete with the cover, and in this case it was the right choice. Funny enough, these were also bought for another project (not scrapped, I just haven't done it yet), but I only needed a little for that and I still have plenty left.
Both of these fics are heavily and beautifully illustrated by the author. The two images on here on the title pages appear in the text as section break dividers, along with many others--they change throughout the fic as a reflection of the changing relationships and mental states of the characters. I couldn't come up with anything for the title page that would equal them, so I chose the two I felt were most fitting and used them here.
Couple of shots of the interior. These have the longest Tables of Contents I've ever done. Both of them spill onto the following pages. And again I was able to incorporate the short chapter summaries. I really like doing this when I can.
And one extra photo, that I did not realize I didn't take during the photoshoot until I was typing up this post. This fic has a truly astronomical number of text messages in it. When I format those for printing I usually take the lead from the author on the level of complexity to go for. If they just use left-aligned and right-aligned text, that's what I'll do, and maybe change the font. But Ao3 has ways to make them actually look like text messages, and that's what the author opted for in this fic, so that's what I did too. But Word has a much more limited capacity for that kind of thing, and these were a beast to wrangle. I had to create two different paragraph styles and position all the speech bubbles by hand. For 700 pages. I don't think you can call that anything but a labor of love, unless you call it insanity. And that's the duality at the heart of fanwork, I think.
It feels weird to end this post the same way I always do, with a neat little "that's that!" This was the work of more than two years. The text document I have is from June 2023, and I asked to bind it in April 2024. I never heard back, but that's how things are sometimes. It will be really strange, maybe even impossible, not to have it in the WIP list. But it's a good kind of strange.
I recently acquired a nipping press or book press. I am trying to do research on it but have only come up with that it's probably made in America sometime in the mid to late 1800's. Here is the original picture
I started the clean up (Finally!! because it's hot and the world is on fire near me * coughcoloradocough*) Anyway as the rust and dirt falls away this gold detail came through. I was going to repaint and now am unsure. But I think I will. I really want to use it.
I visited @verdet-cadet a little while ago and after doing a bookbinding workshop, I couldn't think of a better gift to bring than a physical copy of her own Temeraire fics.
You can go read her amazing work here.
My evil masterplan was to make this a surprise gift, so I decided to keep mum about it to everyone. That only lasted so long though and I finally spilled the beans to @travellingdragon who is also into fanbinding. When I mentioned sleuthing the internet for good layout graphics and fudging around with vector graphics for dragon silhouettes, they said hold my pen and came back ten minutes later with the silhouette of Temeraire himself that you can see on both the title page and chapter title page. My amazing bookbinding press logo is also courtesy of them.
The endpapers depict Flowergirl Volly (@bichobolitach for the Temeraire Summer Exchange, 2023) and A New Chart of the World, on Mercator's Projection (John Cary, 1801).
To many more years of shared joy (and hopefully more fanbindings!)
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