Fanbinding of The Perfect Song by dragonofdispair

The Perfect Song by dragonofdispair

Fandom: Transformers - All Media Types Rating: Explicit Archive Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationship: Jazz/Prowl Characters: Jazz, Prowl, Ricochet, Barricade, First Aid, Sky-Byte

The Perfect Song by dragonofdispair 429 pages, letter-quarto/ 50,061 words

Accompaniment: Companion Pieces to The Perfect Song (Adagio, Coda, Cadenza, and Famous) by dragonofdispair 72 pages, letter-quarto / 4,751 words

The Perfect Song was requested as a bind during our local Renegade Exchange 2024 event. My giftee mentioned they liked quartos and also blue, and so I had the first inklings of a design. My giftee also mentioned they wouldn't mind additional gifts, so I decided to bind the rest of the series as a separate book, mostly because i thought it would look cool and then i would have a reason to make a case too (corral all those books together).

Photos and more discussion under the read-more!

There was some discussion on the Renegade discord about seeing more first-try books, so not only the intimidatingly perfect books are shown. Along those lines, I thought I'd discuss some of the issues I had while binding these 5 books.

I think the moral of this story is that everyone makes mistakes, all the time, everywhere, and that another excellent skill to have is improvising ways to hide/improve your book design one things have gone sideways.

I like to work in batches of books: if I make myself a book, I like to ask the author if they want a copy as well. That way my book acts as the first-time through and hopefully I make all my mistakes on my book, and give the author something that looks better!

Photos and more discussion under the read-more!

Rebinding the All For the Game Trilogy (finally).

This project has been on my radar for ages--ever since the amazon delivery arrive at my door, honestly. No disrespect meant to Nora (she doesn't control the quality of amazon's bookbinding!) but hot damn, the state of these books made me sad.

Stripping them down

I've never done a rebind before. I've always bound fic and so did the formatting, printing, and sewing myself. Holy sweet baby jesus, the the glue-only spine was so fragile and flimsy. You've done us dirty, amazon. To try to patch this up a bit, I added some mull to the spine, and reinforced it with a ton of adhesive. The headbands are decorative, but the colour of the thread matches the pastedowns <3

Making the covers

This is where things got super fun. A million thanks to @europeancupcakes for letting me use their designs. These are absolutely stunning and the reason I finally found the motivation to take this project on.

I've never used an image on a cover before. I've done decorative paper and bookcloth and foiling, but never anything like this and boy was it a learning curve. I finally resized the images (more thanks to @stillmadaboutpetra for help editing these to work as a bookcover. Seriously, I messed up my measurements so many times and was crying for help).

But then I had to sort out what paper to use! 😵‍💫 Card stock didn't work (see below for the wicked creasing), so after a lot of trial and error and visits to my local print shop, I eventually settled on a craft paper designed for pastels. I love how it turned out.

Next I cut the board, picked an off-brown book cloth, measured twice, and glued it all together.

This was SO much fun to work on, and I'm so happy with how it turned out. Please check out the books if you haven't. Once you blaze through them and need a fic rec, my dms are open :)

High School Reunion, class of ‘85 by @deputychairman

I used this cover paper previously for another book where everything went wrong and it warped halfway to hell, but this time everything went smoothly and the book came out crisp! This is cobra kai era fic but I couldn’t resist using some more 80s appropriate colours. This is the entire series, three fics total.

Bound! My own fic, Probationary Action, mostly because I felt like it was politer to start off with doing a shitty job binding my own fic than messing with someone else’s fanworks. (I have a list of stuff I'd like to try binding next, though, and most of it is NOT mine!)

Typeset by me in InDesign with much learning from @renegadeguild resources. (Same with every part of this tbh.)

Bound in Wooqu bookcloth from Amazon. End papers from Dollarama. HTV vinyl cut with my cutting machine for the cover/spine, which I'm slowly learning how to apply without melting the fabric or warping the vinyl ugh but I'm still learning how to center things properly I guess.

This is my…fourth bind in total, and my second fanbind. I have another bind of this that’s bound in blue, but I fucked up the endpapers (ughhh) so I’ll leave that to your imagination. Mistakes are normal! It’s how we learn! But it hurts my brain to look at those endpapers so take my word for it? I'm sending a copy to my beta BFF so she gets the non fucky version yay.

(We do not speak of the first fanbind. Well, maybe I'll share it someday as an encouragement to others? But right now it's in a dark corner thinking about what it did wrong.)

I don’t think I’ve done a craft before where the stakes are so high in executing steps correctly on the first try. There are several spots where there's not a good "undo" button, at least not at my skill level. Quite different from fibre crafts and writing… At least with expensive yarn, I can frog and try again. If I fuck up a cover, that's book board and bookcloth (both $$$ in my region) gone.

It is a great feeling to make something tangible, usable, and entirely mine in a way that fanworks have not been for me previously. It's a book! That I wrote! What? (Every other word is cock.)

3/50!

The Book of Prometheus - Lyricwritesprose

@lyricwritesprose

Fandom: Good Omens

ANOTHER FLIPBACK AND HOLY HECK I LOVE HER! Absolutely love that it was a happy accident that the cover works both portrait and landscape!

Absolutely love this fic and it's only slightly less painful than the fic it's inspired by which is on the list of books I wanna bind

First finished bind since handing my dissertation in so had chance to really sit down with this one and dang I'm so glad I did

What I learned:

- 》Chisels are the way to go for smooth trims《

- Need to practice with edge finishes, for first try though I'm not even mad it's not perfect

- Dying your own fabric for bookcloth IS FUN AS HECK but time consuming

- Negative space really tickles my brain but weeding it makes my brain shrivel up in frustration

Seeing as this is first fic I can actually locate the author, if you see this and want a copy made and sent you as a gift, completely free! Drop me a DM 💖

Manacled by senlinyu

I did not think I was gonna make another Manacled bind and yet here we are! This is a Bible manacled trade with @mysteriousmothbooks ! I cashed it upside down first and then had to cut it out and recase it again 🙃🙃🙃 remember kids, always write down which sidie is the front and which is the back! 

About the bind

✦ duo book cloth featuring paper crane as HTV on the covers ✦ with the dust jacket art I wanted to go for something more messy and slightly abstract. @marinasslibrary said it's a good representation if Hermione obliviating her mind and splitting her memory and what not, very beautifully put into words. @floralbearies said it looks like a cut cheese wheel. Ai laugh u gais ♥️ ✦ dust jacket art style inspired by @ruiriel ✦ black foiled pages!! All the foils

so. wē spacemen in geārdagum

did you know that there is Star Trek fic written in Old English? now you do!

I, of course, had to bind it.

so. wē spacemen in geārdagum by indigostohelit

I knew that I wanted to typeset it so that it had the Old English and the Modern English translation side by side - I did it so that each paragraph started on the same line, so that occasionally there were gaps after one paragraph but not the other, as the text isn't equally long in both languages. it worked out beautifully though. and then of course the author's translation notes following the text, because this is exactly the kind of nerdery I'm here for.

I had initially planned to transcribe the fic into futhorc as well, and include this at the back, but I ran out of steam after one paragraph - and to be fair, futhorc and Old English aren't my strength. I know Old Norse and the futhark, and as alike as they are, they are not the same.

the spine is covered in Duo Skarabaus bookcloth. the cover papers are from Jemma Lewis Marbling & Design, this paper specifically chosen because it looks like galaxies and space. the endpapers are Notpla seaweed, which I chose because I love it and because I always thought spacetravel and exploration had a lot in common with seafarers and voyages (romanticised as both may be). the text is printed on 100gsm 100% recycled eco-craft oatfleck paper.

My most recent bind: Lucky Stars by @magnetarmadda! First time I made TWO copies of a book so I could send one off to the author and I'm very pleased with the result.

Kill your darlings by MesserMoon, a fantastic fic you could read at AO3 for free.

I love this story, and am happy to have it in my collection. That said, I can tell you that this binding was very eventful.

I think I will change my name to Not Perfct bindery. The two volumes of this book took me a long time, because I was buried in workload. It seems that every day I picked up this binding project, I made some mistake. The worst one was sewing the signatures too tightly so it was impossible to round the spine. Another mistake I made while cutting the fabric, as can be seen, the covers were in different proportions. This is my 60th binding; and I must learn that in excess of confidence lies the danger.

@sophsicle

So, a little while back, @pyrrhlc very graciously offered to send me a copy of Child Ballad he had bound, and naturally I was very hyped to accept this offer but (a) I live on the other side of the Atlantic, and (b) any packages I receive at my home address must go through my super, who is both daffy and an asshole, and has kept packages from me for time spans ranging from a week to three months to “denying he ever saw it,” so I was hesitant. But I worked out with my friend who lives in a nicer building that it could be delivered c/o her, so I was very excited about that.

Then there was some trivial misadventuring with the USPS, so I had to ask my friend to go fetch it from the post office for me. “It’s very pleasing to the eye!” she texted me, and I ran uptown to behold the wonder.

Now, the box was slightly bigger than I had anticipated, but I was initially just thinking I didn’t think Child Ballad was that long but I too would be worried about sending intricately-made art over the ocean so extra packing makes sense and joining my friend in admiring the box.

Please note the pattern of the paper. (I actually recognized it from a tumblr post of pyrrhlc’s.)

My friend and I carefully unwrapped it, at which point, she said, “you should make an unboxing video!” and I was not about to wait long enough to do anything that fancy but I did take pictures and look:

WHAT

WHAT

Friends. Comrades. Seen here now at home on my desk:

FOUR BOOKS.

Four extremely beautiful books! Plus an enclosed note with a handsome crow (the books are from the Black Crow Bindery!) which contains kind words about my fics and also edifying facts about the patterns on the covers! The Service Work ones are based on wallpaper from the 1880s! They all have pretty ribbons and handsome Baskerville typeface!

The two Service Work books also have these pretty metal corner guards which probably have a technical name I am unaware of! Tumblr won’t let me add more pictures! You can kind of see them in the others, though!

They are all very beautiful! I am very grateful! Please admire @pyrrhlc’s artistry in this as well as in his writing! I am admiring them on my bookshelf as I speak!

I am writing this at 5am after waking up from a dream about ants (long story) so please forgive me if this is incoherent, but to be honest — objectively kind of the best thing one could wake up to after having a nightmare about ants in the workplace.

I am so, so glad you like the books! In the spirit of Kaz Brekker I kept thinking of this as a long-con, but hopefully a long-con in a nice way, so it’s so lovely to read about your surprise and delight in finding three extra books. They’re all just such fantastic stories — I’m afraid I just couldn’t contain myself.

I had the nebulous idea a while back to try binding Service Work as well as a tiny A5 copy of Murder Ballad to match its Child counterpart, and thennn the V&A released a new paper and I was like oh my god, I could do both! I could make a SET! And subsequently the scheming spiralled from there. I don’t think I mentioned this in the note but the papers for Ballads were both designed by Candice Grey, whose work is also very lovely.

I have spent so many hours loving and enjoying these stories — which I won’t ramble about at length here, because I will definitely embarrass myself in my inability to express how much I love them, but I can’t think of another author who’s more deserving of their work existing in physical form. Even if said books are a bit rough round the edges in parts (looking at you, Served Me Well, you tricksy thing).

I’m happy so they made their way across the Atlantic unscathed! I’m so glad you like them! Thank you again for allowing me to sit down and bind them together - Child Ballad single-handedly cured my fear of making big books, and I learnt so much else besides. 🖤

Dragged my feet on this one for ages and ages for no reason at all - and what a book! The biggest book I’ve made by a couple of hundred pages. But totally worth it, because @linearao3’s work deserves a lovely casing.

I’ve rounded and backed a couple of works since I started this project, but this is probably the best it’s ever gone. And I really love those dropcaps.

466 pages and typeset in Baskerville Old Face

Dragon's Heart and The Serpent and the Angel

For @slow-burn-sally, I bound Dragon's Heart, (my 200th book!?!) and then as a surprise for her bound The Serpent and the Angel.

Dragon's Heart is a wonderful fantasy AU, and The Serpent and the Angel a lovely fairy tale style tribute to Robin McKinley's Beauty.

Dragon’s Heart E 60, 154

The Serpent and the Angel M 54,460

Guys they are BEAUTIFUL!!! Unbelievably gorgeous. All of the work and detail that went into these books is mind-blowing. The quality and care and just the beautiful materials used in creating and binding these fics is beyond. Adding some close ups of the absolutely gorgeous bookmarks, book art, and THE COMMENTS. THEY INCLUDED THE COMMENTS!! I am over the moon ya'll. I am grinning ear to ear. Thank you @brunheiffer from the bottom of my heart. I am humbled by your craft <3

and when you move, I'm moved by Catja [link]

A wee 60 pages- true mini, bound for the @renegadepublishing Tiny Book Bang. Typeset by Indoor Cat Press.

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...this book was so tiny, I lost it in my Drafts! Sharing now, almost a year later, as the 2024 Tiny Books Bang nears it's 2nd typeset reveal

Twilight on Owl Creek Bridge by @yellowocaballero

It is finished. First (and second) binds are officially done, and as the author's copy is officially in the author's hands, I can finally post pictures.

About The Bind

Digital covers and excerpts from the typeset below the cut.

Bound: The complete lyrics of Taylor Swift

I sure hope my niece isn't on tumblr…

She is turning 17 this month, and while I know she reads fic, I don't know if she'd really appreciate a bound copy of Crimson Rivers. I do know she loves Taylor Swift, though. I've seen plenty of lyric books floating around that people have bound, so I thought this would be a fun idea. (Bonus: it's another book I can show friends and family!)

However, not being a Swiftie myself (I think she's a lovely and talented woman, I have nothing against her, I have several of her songs on exercise playlists, but my taste runs more to 90s britpop) I had a lot of questions.

Fortunately, I have friends who were able to answer these questions for me.

Thank GOD I found a google doc on reddit with all of the lyrics. I think if I'd had to copy and paste from somewhere, my niece would be getting a copy of Crimson Rivers instead.

The cover was foiled with my Silhouette, and I was so pleased with how it came out. I used this tutorial on Instagram for my settings. But I couldn't do that with the spine, because lining it up would have been impossible. So I stenciled that on. And a friend advised me to use the cat charms on the ribbon.

Details: Bookcloth: Brillianta in this gorgeous pink Title on cover and spine: Beloved Sans and Beloved Script Body text: Adobe Garamond Pro

freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose by synecdochic

I'd never read any SGA fic before I bound Sheppard's Law last winter, so that fandom popping up for two gift exchanges in a row made me go on a reading binge. In the meantime, I started experimenting with glow-in-the-dark paint.

I completely fucked up the cover the first time, because I tried using a paper stencil: it did not make clean lines. Then I tried a cardstock stencil. Then simplifying the design. Then another cardstock stencil. Then a chip board stencil. All unsuccessful.

What actually ended up working was cutting it out of removable vinyl, sticking it to the cover, painting over it, and then removing it once it was dry. Start with that and save yourself hours of fiddling.