Book Arts and Ficbinding

2D arts of all mediums, libraries and bookstores, and other paper related things. So far I have bound 5 fanfics (tag is #my binds). If your fic is in my AO3 bookmarks (whatapictureisworth) feel free to request a binding! I would be happy to make you a free copy (I may ask you to go halfsies on shipping, depending on where you live).

[whatapictureisworth-press]

Just had a teen anti follow this blog, so for the record, I am:

Pro minding your own business

Anti censorship.

Don’t like, don’t read, and kink tomato (YKINMKATO, or Your Kink Is Not My Kink and That’s Okay) are fandom gospel.

This blog is also nsfw and links to nsfw fics. I frequently write and bind kink-heavy fics myself, so scram, children.

[spockandawe]

And one more bookbinding post! A shorter one. For my brother's wedding, he requested lotr. And I also have another cousin who is recently married and was supposed to he holding a wedding this year, but he and his wife were in a bad car accident that wasn't remotely their fault (rear-ended into incoming traffic), and recovery has been pretty long and gnarly, but I wanted to give them something nice as well. So! Double lotr, all the way across the sky.

I originally planned to mix it up more on the vibes between the two editions (partly so I myself could keep them straight and didn't gift the couples copies with the wrong names), but.... these marble print fabrics are just too powerful, I couldn't say no. I did enough differentiating with the titling and endpapers, it all worked out!

And, naturally, they both needed some edge illustration to take it to the next level!!

So, the green set. I found this gorgeous black and white paper a couple weeks ago at my local art store, and it was SO striking that I grabbed a couple sheets. I was worried at first that it was going to be too busy with the marbled fabric on the cover, but couldn't find anything else that sparked joy, and... i shouldn't have stressed so much, the combo is fantastic. I should trust the maximalist voices in my head! For this one I drew the scene from osgiliath, looking out at minas tirith

After THAT, i was looking to draw something that specifically wasn't More Buildings 😂 I had a pretty magenta paper I've been sitting on that harmonized surprisingly well with the minor colors in the blue fabric. I originally had my eye on a matching leather, but backed away to the same warm navy hide I used for the guestbook, which really gave the whole thing some nice dignity. And the opposite of drawing buildings is drawing CREATURES, so i went absolutely ham on balrog cross-hatching

Both these sets were a ton of fun and came out deliciously! And finished drying two whole days before the wedding! I got PLANY of time 🤣 But truly, I'm not very good at repeating myself, so it means a lot to me that I can be this many lords of the rings deep and still be finding new ways to delight myself. I had a lot of fun with these sets!!

[hppjmxrgosg]

all you new fandom members need to QUIET DOWN oh my god you're going to get us KILLED. we're happy to have you but if you keep talking about BULLSHIT like PUBLISHING fanfic for MONEY, Anne Rice is going to come back from the dead to KILL US. looking at YOU, maurauders fans, heated rivalry fans, byler fans...out here giving out interviews to news channels SHUT UP. we're going to have to start setting off firecrackers to keep the rent down.

[northstarfan]

#unfortunately the kids raised on hustle culture and lack of privacy don’t know much about discretion online and letting hobbies be hobbies

Tags from prev.

[sumi-sprite]

"People wouldn't be paying for the fic, they're paying for my time!"

NO.

DO NOT DO THIS. THIS DOES NOT WORK. IT IS STILL CONSIDERED UNLICENSED DISTRIBUTION OF COPYRIGHTED CONTENT.

DO NOT DO THIS.

SHUT. UP.

[towns-end-bindery]

Archaeology of the Immaterial

The story is a c-novel fanfic by Silvestris and tenddisorder on Ao3 (fandom is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation). I typeset and printed the textblock, stitched it together, trimmed the edges with a wood chisel, hand sanded the edges after, rounded the spine with a cobbler's hammer, and hand sewed the three color silk endbands. The ribbon bookmark I got from a stall at a renaissance faire maybe three years ago. Cover is hand-foiled, using copper backed foil from Mountain Leather Supply. Endpapers are Italian paper from 32 North Supplies.

[knownqueerbaiter]

SEPARATE CHURCH (AO3) AND STATE (TRADPUB)

[coffeepeople]

One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.

[coffeepeople]

Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.

[big-smiling-monkey]

How sweet it is to be with people you enjoy taking care of

[scrollsnsketchbooks]

Cyan Worlds Descriptive Book

Shop | Commissions | Ko-Fi | Discord

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to make a Descriptive Book to gift to Cyan Worlds. This year, I finally finished it.

The book measures at about 8.5"x11.25" and is just shy of 2" thick. The cover was made with distressed and metallic leathers, and the centerpiece is plexiglass with craft paint, puff paint, and a sodalite cabochon.

My hope is to get this book filled with things like fanart, cosplay photos, and letters to Cyan before I hand it over to them so please don't hesitate to contact me if there's something you would like added!

[kayreb]

the leather-bound copies of the MYTH manuscript my sibling and I made for @narcissistcookbook and @thetimeofsome

this project has occupied most of my focus for the last few months...so i think i'm equal parts relieved and sad that it's finally done (and am now in desperate need of new projects)

[cthulhu-with-a-fez]

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)

[wordsintimeandspace]

A small bind of all the Murderbot short stories to complete the series on my shelf. First time painting the edges of a book with acrylic paint and oh boy, did I have a bad time with that.

[erratum-paginae]

I call this one The Bina Collection, and it is a surprise for @binart that was SUCH a long time coming. Bina, I don't know if you remember, but I hope you won't hate me for not warning you ahead of this post!

A bit of context because as usual, I can't help yapping about my process. By now, my huge Call Me Beep Me Excel typeset debacle is well known, but basically: I fell into the VLD fandom completely by accident at the beginning of October 2025. After this (tragic) event (for my sanity), I spent some time going from one AU to another, until I stumbled upon Bina's art. SRPA was my first foray into canon-compliant VLD fancreations, and it was everything I wished for in a post-canon work. It also impacted me as what I consider a creative tour de force: I found Bina so strong for having completed such a massive story in spite of everything, from art to writing. I know many who would have given up.

As it turned out, SRPA was my 1000th bookmark on AO3. So, naturally, I had to bookbind it. Which is how I found myself asking for permission... in October 2025. Yes, that's seven months ago. Stuff™ Happened. It's been hard to keep track. And after Bina answered my enthusiastic (and very shy) request with an even more enthusiastic message, and told me her wish to have a tangible copy of her art, I thought... Hey, I loved BPJ. Why not do BPJ too?

And then, as mentioned, Stuff™. So I thought, you know, sometimes it's important to have reminders of our accomplishments, things that we can be proud of, things that brought joy to both us and the people around.

The Bina Collection was born.

I wanted to keep a coherent visual design for all, something to sort-of remind the good old sci-fi book collections I loved when I was a teen. I went for simple bradel binds, with suede bookcloth (with titles printed on it) for the backs. The covers are black paper, the titles are heat foiled with my laminated machine, and the illustrations are printed and laminated directly on the black paper. Making those was an adventure and a half, but I'm so happy with the result.

The font for the title is the NASA-like font Nasalization: it was the closest I found to the font Bina used for her own title pages!

And since I wanted a harmonised design, I went with my favourite lion pattern. Yes, the one I've already used twice. It's just so good.

This post is already quite long: I'm adding a cut here, you'll find all the details book-by-book beneath it.

Let's start with the one that started it all: SRPA - Space Rangers Partners' Adventures.

I did my best to gather all the comic pages from Bina's Tumblr and set them on black page to try and have a uniform background. After printing, I sewed using a black linen thread so that it wouldn't be too visible. An unfortunate guillotine calibration made it so you can still see the (unavoidable) white margins on some pages, but overall, the black pages succeed in "keeping everything together."

For the written part of the story, I typeset on Affinity Publisher, with the main font used being DilleniaUPC because I like typesetting with serif fonts, but I wanted something that looked more... modern? than good old Times New. I don't know, I liked the vibes.

Chapters are not numbered, but each has its own header with the illustrations Bina specifically made for them. And as you can see, because I can't help it, I typeset the text messages differently. I love this kind of details.

Now, let's move on to my second favourite story, the one that gave me a taste for Langst: BPJ - Blue Paladin's Journey.

For this one, I knew I wanted to use my absolute favourite format, that I already used for Ikimaru's comics and my two lyrics collections, the vertical A4 folio. It makes SUCH FUN BOOKS. Even if, as you can see, I miscalculated for this one and sort-of forgot that it wasn't as wide as the others; hence the cover being too close to the right side... Shhh. It was a conscious design choice, of course.

For the inside, I did the exact same thing as I did for SRPA: I gathered all the frames from Bina's Tumblr and arranged them on a black background. Let's be honest, it took forever, but it was very, very rewarding. I am so happy and proud to have a copy of BPJ (even if, let's be real, this format can be a pain because it doesn't fit on my bookshelves.)

Now let's move on to DTOK - Doomed Timeline Older!Keith Does Time Travel To Save Lance (And Also The Universe Less Importantly).

The doomed timeline may be tragic, and Lance is obviously suffering (...and Keith by extension), BUT it's still so incredibly funny to me. Coran and his stun laser are priceless. This one is quite short compared to the others, and looking back, I shouldn't have done a bradel bind for it: a single-signature might have been enough. It still looks nice like this. Same process as the two above: gathering the pages from Tumblr, black background, black linen thread. Simple, efficient. Nothing too fancy for a nice read.

And let's conclude with the story that ended up being my favourite, because of the taste for Langst I ended up developing thanks to Bina: WAHPCR - What A Healing Pod Can't Repair.

I don't think I can recommend this story enough, and yet, at first, I didn't plan to bind it. I was stuck: it was published earlier, and the links to images were broken, and Bina said that she found the art did not match her style anymore.

BUT, as mentioned: it is my favourite. And if I was doing an actual Bina Collection, this story should be a part of it. And I've already mentioned multiple times that archiving was important to me... So I confess. I fished out the illustrations from Tumblr, and included them in the typeset. If anything, it was a way to show all the work, the evolution, and the love poured into all these stories.

The title page has an illustration from Bina's Tumblr which, if I understood well, is not directly linked to WAHPCR. I didn't want to leave the title page without an illustration (I was still trying to keep a coherent visual design, remember!) and I found it fitting...

The font for the body of text is, once more, DilleniaUPC (following the same rationale as SRPA) and the chapter headers use the font Nasalization again, as well as free assets from PNGegg that I had actually used a year ago for my VRAINS anniversary notebooks and that I love. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to use them for a totally different project.

And... that's it!

It was an ambitious project, and in all honesty, I almost gave up on it after having Affinity Publisher crash on me too many times due to my laptop being old and so many images eating up all its memory. And then when I had to reprint the covers multiple times because I messed up with the foil. And then when—you know what, it doesn't matter, because I kept going even if it took me MONTHS. It meant a lot to me to complete this collection, and I'm glad I did.

(Me for Binderary: I'm never working on seven books at once again Me for the Bina Collection: you know I'm sure I can do six books at once. 🙃)

So thank you so much, @binart, for all the work you've put into this, for everything you've given and keep giving to this fandom (hiatus or not) and for being so enthusiastic when I asked for permission to bind SRPA. Again, I hope you don't hate me for going a little overboard. This project was a big adventure, and I'm so happy I could complete it.

As for everyone else, I can only encourage you to follow Bina, to read her stories on Tapas, on AO3, to maybe commission her, and most importantly: to shower her with love.

(By the way, Bina, all of these above? They are your copies. Let me know if you'd like more photos/a video flipping through the pages. And while shipping from France is terribly tricky for me right now, I'll be moving to the other side of the Atlantic in less than a year, so... Take as much care as you can and hold on till you can have them in hand? 💖)

[runawaymarbles]

Fanbinding: No Place Like by @clytemnestraaa

As is my way now it would seem, I started this one in September. The line in the typeset is the approximate shape of I-10, with LA chapter titles being on the west side and El Paso chapters being on the east side.

The cover was harder: I always thought of this fic as sort of a yellow, which didn't really seem right for a cover. I asked Cly for a description and they said "a warm window at night. so kind of cool blue grey purple evening and then also the warmth of a lamp. that’s so unhelpful my god" but it was, in fact, very helpful. And then this whole book proceeded to be a comedy of errors because:

I had what I thought was the perfect fabric, a sort of two-toned blue/black. I had exactly enough for the cover (thanks, Fitz!) and then proceeded to fuck it up (RIP) by first: gluing the cover (which is made of two thin pieces of board glued together, one of which has a rectangle cut in it) on upside down, so the window was on the bottom half, and then: leaving too much space around the spine.

So I made a new one with the blue moire, of which I have...plenty. Cover went fine. Got the paper window in perfectly. Did a practice run with the stamping machine (known hereonout as The Machine, to keep with my Princess Bride equipment name theme.) Measured it, then, like Icarus, though I could make a measurement adjustment on the fly and have it come out correctly. Reader, it did not:

I spent like ten minutes trying to convince myself that it was fine. But. It wasn't fine. So I started over.

Anyway. Covers 3 and 4 are what you see in the final versions. I eventually figured out that if I taped a few layers of watercolor paper on top of the cover to test the location in The Machine, I could make sure to line it up exactly correct. I also figured out that I could do this by adjusting the placement just slightly between stamps:

So maybe I'll try and do that on purpose at some point, though I'm sure that's when it'd ultimately fail me.

Anyway, the punchline of all of this is that after all of this, over the course of a few months, I made an error that was a first for me, and everyone I showed it to. The endpaper curled when I put paste on it, and I didn't notice. You kind of have to laugh:

I don't ENTIRELY hate it because there's no board showing and it gives an interesting page turn effect. but that was NOT the intended outcome. RIP. I sent the author the successful one.

[perfectlynormalbooks]

Sunless Knights by MacBudgie / @mushroomlasagna - a Hollow Knight/Sunless Skies crossover!! Casebound in folio. One copy for me, one copy for the author. Both games have very unique aesthetics, so I had fun figuring out ways to incorporate the iconography into the design.

[eggfriedpenguin]

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Paperback to hardcover rebind. I made four different cover variants. Adrian pattern is printed on 50x50cm fabric, which gave me enough wiggle room to make sure that none of the four slipcases have the same pattern

Andy Weir was kind enough to send me signed book plates! One of them I've put in my personal copy, the others I will be saving for something later coming this year :)

Rest of the copies are going out to my friends <3

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[partywithponies]

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

[waterloggedowl]

It's done! I finally completed my bind of @cataclysmicevie 's TGCF rewrite No Paths Are Bound! This has been a project a year in the making. Typesetting this monster (~1.16 million words) was a herculean task. Affinity crashed so many times as I tried to import the text. Even breaking it into its 5 volume sections was a long wait as things loaded in.

The title/intro/chapter pages were designed using Canva. If I could change anything at this point, it would be the butterflies on the chapter page were white instead of silver; the contrast on the intro page is just stunning. The font used for the headings is Khiara Script which can be found on dafont. Body text is Garamond.

The page edges were painted using a set of stencils custom cut into removable vinyl. Weeding was a bitch but the results were absolutely worth it! Textblocks were all painted with a red base layer then went into the press. I had to line up all the textblocks and ratchet strap them together so the mural was seamless between volumes. The stencils helped me with getting basic background patterns down and outlining the finer details. After that was a lot of hand painting and playing around with mixed metallics. The clouds are a personal favorite part for me; it's hard to see in the pictures but the metallics really showed the painting direction and lent an added depth to the mural.

Hunting for fabric to use for the covers was a task. Without Joann's to fall back on, I visited basically every quilting fabric store in my area. I found some really cool stuff, but nothing that fit the color scheme I was looking for, so off to etsy I went. I wound up finding this wonderful pattern and was really happy with the quality when it arrived! The bookboards are completely covered in the fabric from edge to edge so when the leather was put down, there weren't lines that would show through after pressing.

This was my first foray into book charms and I think I'm hooked. They are a great little addition to the final look. This project also marks my mastery of double-core headbands! After doing 10 of them, I am finally getting consistent results and understanding how to get full coverage and even lines.

Overall, this was a monster of a project and pushed me in many ways, but I learned so much from it! I already have plans for when Evie finishes the sequel.

[sammialex]

Book 88 ✅ duo bookcloth in mudbath from @cover-story-bindery ‘s stash and leftover peony Indian print paper from Hollanders from a rebind I did last year. This has reinforced my inability to throw anything out ever.