people on TikTok donât realize fic binding didnât begin with idiots selling mass printed fanfiction on TikTok-Shop. They think it started as a negative thing ON TIKTOKđit started on tumblr years ago as a way to appreciate authors!! It was never about selling fics, weâre AGAINST THAT HERE and always have been. I am so tired of the way TikTok rewrites fandom culture.
A surprise bind. While Zapped was working through the art for SotM for me, IâŠ.kinda got carried away. I had been looking for a reason to bind this fic, so this was perfect reason to.
The soulmate idea is one that i loveloveLOVE. Red string of fate, find each other in every universe, this was always going to happen - I eat that shit up. So for this fic, I swept through and found every mention of a soulmate, bond, or soulbond - and highlighted them all red. (Sineala taught me a new word today - rubrication. I stole the idea from the Medieval Manuscripts research I did for a previous bind, but of CORSE there's an actual word for it. It just felt right to do...)
I pulled my overall inspiration from the Le Chat Noir - the 1896 poster, specifically, you know the one. Between the lace, the cat, and the color combo - everything felt like it fit really well with the theme of the story. I wish I could explain why it felt like it fit, exactly. Maybe because Ults tony has always felt like such a cat to me. Or maybe itâs the hue of the whole universe has thisâŠold paper, big band, gramophone sound to it. Either way, i grabbed on to the idea and leaned in.Â
Overall, this bind for MTH 2024 was the simplest. Probably because the original idea was so clear. Other than working through finding all the right words to highlight in the text block, the whole book was put together very quickly - then sat on my hard drive for half a year.
This fic is delightful. Itâs got my favorite flavor of angst - the gay panic guilt is sooooo yummy. Please go read it (or, read it again!)
Hi there, I stumbled on a couple of your post regarding typesetting which Iâm so grateful for. I was wondering if youâd share how you create your penguin classics covers?
Ofc yeah! So if you're wondering about the penguin classics covers specifically, then I just use this generator to make them. It's pretty easy, you type in the author + title and drop in the file image. But if you mean specifically the archive classics covers with the back and spine and al, then that's a bit more of complicated process.
To make it easy and accurate, I download the custom cover template that lulu provides for the measurements. I ignore the safety margin, but everything else gets a guideline in InDesign.
To make it penguin specific, I stared for a long time at my own penguin classics. And took measurements. But also, this website is very helpful: https://penguinseriesdesign.com. It's the Penguin Series Design, which goes through all of the different designs that Penguin had done for their covers over the years. This one specifically is for the Penguin classics. In the second link, they provide a link to Jim Stoddart's website, where he diagrams a cover he did for Penguin, and shows the grid, fonts, font sizes, and even CMYK color lol. Jim Stoddart, if you don't know, was the art director of Penguin who redid the covers for the Modern Penguin Classic look.
If you want to get more into the specifics of the Penguin Design, Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover was very useful.
The sans serif font is FuturaEF Book. The serif is Mrs. Eaves Roman. The glyph is a random one I chose from the font, Davys, which has the cutest glyphs btw. I chose this one because it kinda looks like Hermes to me.
And then I usually pull the summary from ao3 or if there isn't one, write one myself. Or I'm feeling particularly lazy, and the ao3 summary is just a quote from the fic, I'll copy + paste that in as is. If the summary is short, I'll sometimes put in reviews from commenters.
Ummm that's all I can think of for now, but if you have any more questions/want to know more/need clarification, feel absolutely free to hit me up!
âShould I use InDesign to lay out my books?â - A Passionate Guide
Ok, if you are like me, you recently stumbled upon @armoredsuperheavyââs brilliant blog about bookbinding and fanfiction, and now you are excited to throw yourself head-first into bookbinding.
This also means that you are about to invest a fair amount of time into figuring out how exactly to lay out books. What you end up getting comfortable with will most likely be what you end up using long term, so it is worthwhile giving it some thought. The question really comes down to this: whoâs name will you be cursing for the foreseeable future? Adobe? Or Microsoft?
Full disclosure: I only started using InDesign because I was forced to. I worked as an editor at a newspaper, and that was what we used. The beginning was hell. I wonât sugar coat it, it sucks. In the end it was worth it. Once you figure it out, InDesignâs potential far outstrips Microsoft Word (in my opinion).
That encouragement means very little when you open this treacherous program for the first time and see THIS:
âWhat?! I will literally give you $100 if you guess what all the buttons on the left are for. How the fuck do I make the margins disappear!?â
So, if using InDesign means figuring out what at least one third of the tools on the left are for, lets talk pros and cons.
TL; DR: the internet is temporary!!! printed books (for your own private amusement) are forever!!!
What I do:
Basically, I choose fics that I think deserve to be printed and typeset them using a software called Adobe InDesign. InDesign is the professional standard in the industry, but there are definitely easier (and cheaper!) options for formatting.
Once I've chosen a fic, there a few different things I have to decide: the font, glyphs, book size, and the hors-texte (title page, contents, etc).
Then, I go about copy + pasting the text into the software, and formatting them. Usually, that just means deleting the blank space of lines that for some reason appears between paragraphs.
Every element, and I mean every single element, is designed for the reader's comfort. At no point should the reader feel lost or unable to continue because of the way the text is formatted. This means using serif fonts instead of sans-serif fonts for the body text and making sure that there aren't any widows/orphan lines. I have specific justification settings so that the spacing between words and letters are even and smooth to the reader's eye.
I also think about headers and page numbers more than you would expect. Should the page numbers be on top or bottom? Centered or at the corners. Should I have headers at all? And if so, what should they say?
When I began, and I still do this occasionally, I grabbed books off my shelves and examined their formatting. Then I'd question why they made this design choice or that. All publishers have their special little quirks and features, and if I spotted something I liked, I would incorporate that into my own works. For example, Penguin Classics love their classic serif fonts and headers. Barnes and Noble Classics have a feature in their hors-texte that is their "From the Pages Of" section.
While there are many amazing and necessary reasons to read e-books, I enjoy the physicality of a printed book. Nothing can beat the sensation of turning the next page, the smell of paper, or the weight of your next great adventure in your hands. Fanfiction more than deserves to be experienced in that way too.
But also, I've always had a lingering suspicion regarding the temporal nature of digital media and of the internet in general. Fanfiction, in particular, are at risk of disappearing forever, and while you can obvs download it (which I always always do), there's a slight chance that you may not be able to access the technology in order to view it. Books don't require laptops or phones or internet service.
It's a silly movie, but Leave the World Behind (2023) showcases this perfectly, albeit with streaming services and dvds.
Finally, with the ever-changing landscape of the internet and technology, who knows if say archaeologists would be able to access ao3 in a 100 or even 50 years. Look at USB-As, and how quickly they're going out of use. Physical media like printed books will certainly last for decades longer. My ultimate (and idealistic) goal is to have a physical, printed library of fanfiction for both private enjoyment and for the academic study of fanfiction in the anthropological and literary fields. The latter will most likely not happen in my lifetime (if ever at all), but a girl can dream!
Copyright
This is slightly sketchy but from what I can tell from my research is that most sites don't give an af if you print like one copy for yourself and you do not print en-masse or start selling them. So like Manacled. Don't do what those kids did and put up your copies on etsy. I don't. I print this for myself and myself only. And I've never gotten a cease and desist letter or anything like that.
Requests are open: if you have a fic you think deserves the archive classics treatment, lmk! I do not accept payment. This is all free.
Examples!
starving works, heaven dust, another, anyhow, i've got a match, smoke gets in your eyes by @lesbiancolumbo
noble consuls of rome by ballantine
Typesetting + Cover done in InDesign
full pdf here
A Current Cover I'm Working On:
This one is a linen wrap, which means it has flaps!
so about a year and a half ago my partner got on a nostalgia kick for Jak & Daxter, and i - having lived under a rock growing up - had never actually heard of it before! the conversation very quickly evolved from "well, it's a lot more fun to play than to watch being played," to "there are a lot of elements that it touched on that it never really explored as in-depth as it could have," to "you know what, if i'm gonna introduce you to one of my favorite games, i'm gonna do it with STYLE," and they ultimately ended up spending the next sixteen months writing me a complete bespoke novelization of the first game on discord one message at a time XD
(i love them so god damn much. i'm already planning to bind their currently-ongoing J&D 2 writeup.)
anyway, i'd always meant to get into bookbinding and this seemed like the perfect place to start - never mind that the formatted document was 160k+ and 500 pages long, go big or go home, right?
i emerge from my extended hours in "baby otter convinced it's dying when put in water before it realizes it was built for swimming" crafting skill-tree purgatory to show you: my first-ever bookbinding project!
i got the cover paper, endpapers, spine & corner leather, davy boards, and embroidery floss for sewing up the signatures from michaels. the text block was printed on 24-lb, 50% recycled 96 bright copy paper from staples. i made my own book press out of two cutting boards and some assorted hardware, and a bit of research into leather paring led me to this blog post by a professional book conservator, who recommended razor planes for small-scale leather paring as a step below an actual spokeshave - i found one for $20 on ebay and it turns out it works PERFECTLY, strongly recommend. i used a combination of @armoredsuperheavy's how-to document and DAS Bookbinding's round-backed bradel binding and half-leather library binding tutorials for the case.
i formatted the text block in google docs, using Epilogue for the body text and Shadows Into Light for the headers. i used the in-game Precursor script for the covers, spine, and foretitle, done by screenshotting individual letters from a translation chart and assembling them in MS Paint, and the splash title features a nice series logo vector i yoinked from its wikipedia page. i used this tool for doing the signature layout. i did have to do quite a bit more line-editing than is probably normal for fanbinding since i was taking it from a raw discord copy-paste to a Formatted Novel(TM), but my partner gave it the okay and it did give me the chance to come up with some fun chapter title names XD
using sealemon's text block sewing tutorial let me colorcode the binding thread to which portion of the elemental powerup progression of the game was being covered, with the added bonus of adding an extra little pop of color to go along with the concept art portraits, character model/gameplay screenshots, and a few of their own original illustrations my partner included while they were writing! i ended up just doing a buttonhole stitch in black for the endbands, since i didn't have any pre-made ones on hand.
i don't have a cricut and i don't know how to do the fancy heat-transfer vinyl thing, so i just had to make do with a 9 mm olfa knife and several hours' worth of patience for the cover text XD
what ended up working really well was to lay strips of delicate-surface painter's tape onto a sheet of printer paper, print the assembled strings of text onto the tape, and cut out the lettering to make a custom sticky stencil! put it on the book where you want it, pat it down really good, and fill it in with a couple coats from a fine-tip Posca paint pen. peel it gently back up, and boom - beautifully crisp painted lettering! :D
(in case anyone's curious, the spine/front cover/foretitle say "JAK AND DAXTER", the front cover additionally has "SQUID" as the author name at the bottom-right corner, and the back cover says "IF YOU CAN READ THIS", "YOU'RE A NERD", and "I LOVE YOU". the game devs apparently included all KINDS of easter eggs in the in-game text that people have translated over the years, i couldn't NOT, lmao)
okay, more posts of free stuff for binderary! yeah!
here's a bunch of bookbinding/typesetting ornaments that i made! a while ago i went on a kick of drawing random little ornaments to use in book design and typesetting, and all of them are available for free to use in a gdrive folder here!
there's also a README document with permissions info - basically, please credit me if you use these, don't use them for for-profit projects or make money off them, and please make note if you edit them from the original. you can also message me if you have ideas for new ones i could make! i do still make more of these every so often.
(also also, these are free to use, but if you really WANT to donate to my ko-fi because you like them... i will never say no to a tip, i am so broke lmao the economy is in shambles)
anyway enjoy!!! have fun!!!! feel free to tag me in a post if you use any of these in your books, i would love to see them and hype you up!!
My typeset for @renegadeguild 's 2025 Tiny Book Exchange!
[An exchange where you typeset a smaller fic and then someone binds it for you! [or you only typeset a fic or just bind someone else's submitted typeset, ya got options]]
typeset made (you're here) | bind made
This fic is such a treat to read and felt perfect for making a small, hand-sized book of! @ironfamjam 's Give Me Your Fear, I'll Give You My Faith
Summary: "Hit with a spell meant for Arthur, Merlin loses his senses one by one and all Arthur can do is watch."
I made 9 small, woodcut-style drawings for the different hand signs in this fic
and I finally got to use some of the medieval-esk fonts I've been stashing, hehe (and here's the book notes pages for credits:)
I am so very excited to present free typeset #33: Grimms' Fairy Tales, by, of course, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. (Apologies for this being quite a long post, but I really wanted to show pictures of what's available in these typesets!)
When I saw this in my ask box, I knew I had to do a typeset for it. But there were so many individual tales, and I wanted to do something a bit unique for each of them. But I also wanted to use a lot of color. And throw in some art. And that might make the typeset not so super printer friendly for some folks, so....
I made two versions of this typeset! Two different designs and color options. Both pdfs are available for FREE here and are sized for half letter (letter folio).
Grimms' Fairy Tales typeset version one is the full color version with a lot of little details and different art/motifs for each story (most of the art I used was by Maurice Pillard Verneuil; his stuff is so pretty).
And for the second version of the typeset (which I dubbed the Black and White, Hold the Art Alt in my google drive archive--I need a shorter name for that. The Deep Drive? Drivechive? Googachive?--I went black and white printer friendly, with prominent featuring ornaments and a more simple design.
You can see the differences clearly above. Both these typesets were a lot of fun to make, and I hope they print out well for people wanting to use them. It's one I hope to be able to print out soon for myself, to have as a personal physical copy. I kept stopping in the middle of typesetting just to read a few tales. (Cat-Skin and Snow White and Rose-Red are my two favorite tales (I just love the changed appearance lover trope), though The Juniper-Tree has a a solid standing with best revenge death.)
Anyway, use these typesets as you wish! If there's any issues with the files, feel free to let me know! Just please leave credit and consider tagging me if you use them, or reblog if you can!
More details and interior shots of the first version are below the break!
So the black and white version has pretty much the same design across all the different chapters, while the color version has a different swatch of art featured next to each title, to give some flair to each individual story. The whole double border around the drop caps was inspired by another (much more talented than I) member on Renegade Bindery, but I added in the extra picture frame for the motifs and changed some things around to get the sort of clean, classic, elegant vibe I was hoping for (originally, I was going to use good ol' IM FELL English and go with a much more gritty, vintage-y design, but changed it after seeing how well Crimson Text worked for the fairy tales (like I've said before, Crimson Text is a special occasion sort of font).
Here's some more screenshots of the chapter beginnings (albeit a bit pixelated. Dang screenshots and their low quality):
The table of contents is pretty fun as well, extending the same borders and motifs design to full three pages:
And the fun also extended to the last page with info on the Brothers Grimm:
All in all, this was one of my favorite books to work on. If you have any suggestions for future typesets, my ask box is always open!
Edit: also, the borders/frames going around the dropcaps were inspired by a design I saw done by the talented @teleportbooks!
This is a quarto typeset for the fic more precious than gold by Drag0nSt0rm avaliable to read on A03. This is another case of creating a new copy of the previous typeset even though I did really like my previous one that I had made back in 2024 when I first got into the hobby. I am redoing these typesets for a higher print quality and as I am keeping a lot of the different design choices the same as before. As I wasnât also planning and make these choices and the fact that the fanfic is 12,949 words long, it didnât take long to make for a typeset. I spent maybe 10 to 15 minutes on the cover ages back (pre-timing) and used a lot of those elements and the typeset images when recreating or making new images to include. I spent 5 minutes making the title pages but it did take 10 to 15 to go through the old typeset (via Office Libre as google docs doesnât let you copy your images from the doc) to recreate the text separators.
The typeset itself only took a little over 1 hour and 20 minutes to make.
This would be even less if I didnât go through the fanfic and the typeset side by side to italicise all the different parts of the fic that were in italics (doesnât copy over to Affinity). This means that I spent about 1 hour and 45 minutes to create. This does not include the 1st typeset being made which would have taken quite a while due to lesser program and still learning the basics of typesetting. Such a cute fanfic from an amazing writer!
âShould I use InDesign to lay out my books?â - A Passionate Guide
Ok, if you are like me, you recently stumbled upon @armoredsuperheavyââs brilliant blog about bookbinding and fanfiction, and now you are excited to throw yourself head-first into bookbinding.
This also means that you are about to invest a fair amount of time into figuring out how exactly to lay out books. What you end up getting comfortable with will most likely be what you end up using long term, so it is worthwhile giving it some thought. The question really comes down to this: whoâs name will you be cursing for the foreseeable future? Adobe? Or Microsoft?
Full disclosure: I only started using InDesign because I was forced to. I worked as an editor at a newspaper, and that was what we used. The beginning was hell. I wonât sugar coat it, it sucks. In the end it was worth it. Once you figure it out, InDesignâs potential far outstrips Microsoft Word (in my opinion).
That encouragement means very little when you open this treacherous program for the first time and see THIS:
âWhat?! I will literally give you $100 if you guess what all the buttons on the left are for. How the fuck do I make the margins disappear!?â
So, if using InDesign means figuring out what at least one third of the tools on the left are for, lets talk pros and cons.
TL; DR: the internet is temporary!!! printed books (for your own private amusement) are forever!!!
What I do:
Basically, I choose fics that I think deserve to be printed and typeset them using a software called Adobe InDesign. InDesign is the professional standard in the industry, but there are definitely easier (and cheaper!) options for formatting.
Once I've chosen a fic, there a few different things I have to decide: the font, glyphs, book size, and the hors-texte (title page, contents, etc).
Then, I go about copy + pasting the text into the software, and formatting them. Usually, that just means deleting the blank space of lines that for some reason appears between paragraphs.
Every element, and I mean every single element, is designed for the reader's comfort. At no point should the reader feel lost or unable to continue because of the way the text is formatted. This means using serif fonts instead of sans-serif fonts for the body text and making sure that there aren't any widows/orphan lines. I have specific justification settings so that the spacing between words and letters are even and smooth to the reader's eye.
I also think about headers and page numbers more than you would expect. Should the page numbers be on top or bottom? Centered or at the corners. Should I have headers at all? And if so, what should they say?
When I began, and I still do this occasionally, I grabbed books off my shelves and examined their formatting. Then I'd question why they made this design choice or that. All publishers have their special little quirks and features, and if I spotted something I liked, I would incorporate that into my own works. For example, Penguin Classics love their classic serif fonts and headers. Barnes and Noble Classics have a feature in their hors-texte that is their "From the Pages Of" section.
While there are many amazing and necessary reasons to read e-books, I enjoy the physicality of a printed book. Nothing can beat the sensation of turning the next page, the smell of paper, or the weight of your next great adventure in your hands. Fanfiction more than deserves to be experienced in that way too.
But also, I've always had a lingering suspicion regarding the temporal nature of digital media and of the internet in general. Fanfiction, in particular, are at risk of disappearing forever, and while you can obvs download it (which I always always do), there's a slight chance that you may not be able to access the technology in order to view it. Books don't require laptops or phones or internet service.
It's a silly movie, but Leave the World Behind (2023) showcases this perfectly, albeit with streaming services and dvds.
Finally, with the ever-changing landscape of the internet and technology, who knows if say archaeologists would be able to access ao3 in a 100 or even 50 years. Look at USB-As, and how quickly they're going out of use. Physical media like printed books will certainly last for decades longer. My ultimate (and idealistic) goal is to have a physical, printed library of fanfiction for both private enjoyment and for the academic study of fanfiction in the anthropological and literary fields. The latter will most likely not happen in my lifetime (if ever at all), but a girl can dream!
Copyright
This is slightly sketchy but from what I can tell from my research is that most sites don't give an af if you print like one copy for yourself and you do not print en-masse or start selling them. So like Manacled. Don't do what those kids did and put up your copies on etsy. I don't. I print this for myself and myself only. And I've never gotten a cease and desist letter or anything like that.
Requests are open: if you have a fic you think deserves the archive classics treatment, lmk! I do not accept payment. This is all free.
Examples!
starving works, heaven dust, another, anyhow, i've got a match, smoke gets in your eyes by @lesbiancolumbo
noble consuls of rome by ballantine
Typesetting + Cover done in InDesign
full pdf here
A Current Cover I'm Working On:
This one is a linen wrap, which means it has flaps!
After countless hours sifting through fonts, I have finally come to a realization on the perfect font.
Now, traditionally, it may make sense to use a serif font, but in actuality a sans serif font is much easier to read and more reflective of common modern typefaces. Thus I have searched for a sans serif font that is versatile enough for any occasion, ranging anywhere from a middle school party invite to a 90s themed blog post. A sans serif font that has a distinctive look without being too futuristic or sterile looking. A sans serif font that could combine readability with nostalgia while also being instantly recognizable, iconic, and accessible.... If all these elements could come together, then of course it would be the perfect font.
But does this perfect font exist? Why, yes it does! I wouldn't waste your tumblr reading time if it didn't. But what is the perfect font?
yousharknotpass
2087
gracieabrams
origamiaround
