Æthereal Press

It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.

Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.

When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.

She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)

Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.

That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."

I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.

I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.

I bound a trio of Friday Night Lights pamphlets for her — the only fics from that fandom in her vast repertoire — and added a folding case reminiscent of the DVD case.

The first flower Obi-Wan hacked up on the bridge of the newly-named Negotiator was a marigold. Thankfully, this one didn’t come with roots—those were always the worst, leaving his throat sore or abraded for days after—and was relatively small. He’d felt the rattle in his lungs when as he’d first walked through the shining halls of the Venator, the soft-spun stoppage of petals and stem in his chest.

Due to my move causing a book binding hiatus, I decided to do a project to get back into things where I didn't need to do the typeset. @mourningmountainsbindery made this beautiful typeset for @catboydogma's great codywan hanahaki AU, and serendipitously I had done a painted silk class with @aetherseer when she visited me in Japan a while ago, resulting in a very pretty flower design - so! Put the two things together made bookcloth out of my silk.

This is a wonderful fic series, and I particularly like how in this AU hanahaki disease is not fatal, and more based on one's own feelings than whether it's reciprocated.

I also pulled out some of my floral chiyogami for cloth-jointed endpapers (mayhaps... i fucked up cutting the endpapers & thats why they are cloth jointed), and colored the edges with acrylic ink, and when there's so many Japanese components I have to sew the endbands in the Japanese silk, ofc.

Multi billion dollar corporations: We make crap AI ads because we rather hang themselves than pay an extra cent for a quality work.

Midsize art supply manufacturer: We commissioned a watercolor artist to make an illustration for every color of our watercolor palette and make it into an art book with swatches.

Now this is the kind of thing I am here for. I'm generally not a fan of "people being good at things on the internet", mostly when it's presented in that tiktok/asmr/perfectionism style.

Tried a little experiment here. When I put on the metallic paper it got a little skewed and rubbed a bit so I decided to use some ribbon as an accent to hide the flaw and it came out looking great.

Its a Victorian era Thorki AU so the Loki colors and metallics seemed to fit the vibe. I am really glad the ribbion accent worked and for sure plan to use it again in the future.

One of the movies we watched INCESSANTLY while we were dating, took along on our honeymoon, play a "Comma mockingly imitates characters" drinking game with, and have queer headcanons for is the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Why is it our favorite? I mean, have you SEEN the cast? Also The Hand Clench. Enough said. Since we haven't already purchased enough variations of the book, I obviously had to bind them another copy. I made my own typeset of the illustrated edition (sans the drop caps and chapter headers) and, since letters are a decent portion of the book, I picked out unique handwriting fonts for each letter writer.

Originally this was supposed to be a 2023 Christmas present but uh. Life happened and the book did not. So instead, I gifted them the textblock for Christmas and they helped choose the rest of the cover materials to complete for their birthday! Lots of purples, some pinks and reds, with a touch of gold - purple should surprise no one, obviously we got together because we share a favorite color. We even broke into my Crepaldi stash, though as it was my first time working with it, I didn't realize it would wrinkle quite so much during glueing and nearly cried to behold it. Thankfully the wrinkles mostly came out as it dried and pressed, so all was not lost! In repayment for the emotional distress, the rest of the casing in was a DREAM.

Should I have rounded this one? Absolutely. Did I? Certainly not, the concept terrifies me for no good reason. Did I cut the first perfectly lovely attempt at endbands off because they we just a few wraps off from symmetrical? I mean, have you met me?, of course I did, it would've bugged me. They're lovely now, move past it. Did I change up my usual colophon book curse to fit the theme? Holy Grail insults will always remain my beloved, but I am rather proud of this curse, everyone say thank you @daemonluna for the inspiration. Should I have done ONE MORE LOOK THROUGH before printing? Headers on chapter title pages and That One Pesky Image Placeholder HIGHLIGHTED YELLOW point to yes. Oops. But hey, that's what makes it unique, handmade, and crafted with love, right?

Technical stuff below the cut.

@bindrebindery shared their bookcloth swatches that they have collected over the years and I thought that was such a neat way to create a small archive and reference material, that I started swatching all the bookcloths I have and some of the endpapers I have used too

Fanbinding(ish): Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

(More photos below the cut, and I'll add the rest in another reblog.)

I had the idea for this four years ago. I actively started on the typeset about two years ago. I finished the typeset in about two weeks before the NG news broke--in fact I'd sent him an ask on tumblr just before he left, asking him if there's an explanation for Good Omens's inconsistent dropcaps. Maybe I'll ask the publisher.

Anyway! I almost didn't keep going, but I'd already put an insane amount of hours into the typeset, and also, fuck it. So I did it mostly for me, but also for Terry Pratchett, and also for the vine.

For those who aren't familiar, a red-letter Bible is one where everything Jesus says is in red. I thought it would be funny to do one where everything the antichrist says is in red--and then I also thought it would be funny to do pull-out quotes like my Catholic Youth Bible had, and then I thought, why stop there, and that's when things started to get weird. Trying to get the text to line up coherently around the trees and the mountains especially was delicate--and of course if I changed something on the page before it would throw everything out of whack.

The cover was inspired by those giant Bibles with covers that are an inch thick with a cross or something like that debossed in the middle. The text wasn't long enough to make it that thick, but it's two layers of thin board glued together. Leather on top, and then I used a foil quill to do most of the design--anything that's a circle is a brass stamp.

I make the design on Illustrator, and then had the cricut trace it onto the foil with a sharpie. I found that a lot more effective than printing it out and trying to do the foil quill through the paper stencil. I'll let you try and guess what shape I used instead of a cross, and will put the answer under the cut.

Doing gold page edges was a bitch and a half; I sanded off attempts about a dozen times. Fake gold was a bust; so was heat activated foil. I ended up doing one layer of acrylic paint and about five layers of gold acrylic.

And because I got this a lot about My Immortal: no, I'm not going to share the typeset. Even before Everything, I feel fine justifying this because I own the paperback, the deluxe edition hardback, the DVD, the script book, and the coffee table book. But I'm not actually into book piracy. (Unless you are the Terry Pratchett estate, in which case, sharing is caring.)

Fanbinding(ish): Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

You've heard of the quarto-legal. Now get ready for the...

Quatro Legal

(ramen for scale.)

Okay. So. Context. For understandable reasons, people regularly say "quatro" when they mean "quarto," when talking about page size. (It's what it sounds like: a quarto is a quarter of a page.) @mourningmountainsbindery @zhalfirin-binds @ficcinghell and I were wondering what a "quatro legal" would actually look like, and decided it would have to be four legal sheets in a 2x2 grid.

So this book is 28" tall, and 17" wide.

I printed it on a large format printer a friend of mine was kindly willing to give me access to, and it's folded accordion style--looks like this when it's fully extended:

and the covers are chip board, though if I did it again I'd shell out for proper davey board, because I ended up spending way more time on the cover than I'd planned.

Here it is at the @renegadeguild retreat, with @mourningmountainsbindery's quarto legal, for scale:

Process pictures and videos under the cut.

My personal goal is to try and make fanfic binding as accessible to everyone as possible, so here are some resources on how to make a fanfic hardcover for under $25.

This is a barebones bind for the broke college students and such. Happy to field questions, too!

Here's a proposed budget breakdown:

Loosely organized thoughts:

Fanfic bookbinders often share typesets amongst each other. Never pay for a typeset for a fanfic.

You'll hear a lot about grain direction for your printer paper, but as a newbie on a budget without your own printer, settle for some nice 92 bright paper. If you like the hobby, splurge after but expect to pay at least 2-3x more for short grain paper.

Printing is a pain because some copy shops won't let you print intellectual property smut, and it's very expensive. You are better off bartering instead or looking for a free printer on Buy Nothing.

You know the thick paper wrapping that comes with online orders? It's a good weight for endpapers if you need to scrounge. Paper grocery bags or gift bags (birthday presents) might work, too.

Ask your local library to give you covers from books they are throwing out. Ask for outdated textbooks (those covers are built like tanks) or three-ring binders that are too busted to be binders anymore.

Obtain a used book that was mass produced (so your destruction of it does not impede anyone's access) and maybe even become a little vindictive with it.

If you can afford it, I recommend the Olfa SVR knife (~$10)

If you can afford it, upgrade your ruler to a t-square.

I really hope this resource is helpful! I want to stress how possible this is and encourage people to cherish what they love through art.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!

This is 1 of 2 posts for today, a massive project that I have hit a significant milestone for: completion of both my & the author's 15-volume set of the 1.1 million word The Desert Storm. This is the fic series that got me into Star Wars as an actual fan.

Four years after Order 66 and the fall of the Jedi Order, a grieving, struggling Ben Kenobi finds himself inexplicably taken back in time, crashing headlong into the foundations of fate. Grasping hope and vengeance with both hands, Ben rebuilds his identity and seeks to change the course of history: by saving Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi Order, the galaxy - and just maybe saving Obi-Wan Kenobi along the way.

My design for this typeset was significantly influenced by mem, who had begun a typeset before me and selected black & white images for the title pages, a trend I continued.

As this fic series has meteliculous attention to both canon & EU lore, I stuck with aurebesh characters for titles wherever appropriate, which occasionally gave me some fun opportunities for chapters & tables of contents like this:

For scene dividers, I used a image you can interpret either as twin suns, or as an eclipse.

While I committed to a more classic and less elaborate design for this series, I still rounded & backed every volume in the set. "Editioning" high numbers of similar books like this is often considered in bookbinding circles as necessary to practice skills (I am at 37/45 volumes), and I can certainly say that I have gotten much better at a number of things along the way. The largest book in this series is 616 pages; the smallest, 160 - and I needed to round & back both.

Further thoughts...

Die Mumins - Tove Jansson (The Moomins)

(Keep reading for full cover pictures, close ups of the endbands with a peek of the endpapers and links to the individual book posts)

It passed the sniff test with Frog, by the way.

Deeply grateful to @fantailpress for this incredible gift, which has been on quite a journey across the world to make it here. I'm constantly in awe of the things people make, and honoured that they chose my work as their inspiration!

@daemonluna gifted me a hard copy of my Mass Hysteria typeset last year, so this is actually the only copy I have personally made.

This book is about 1.75"/4.5cm tall. First time rounding corners and doing a leather pseudo half-bind. Title is hot stamped in four colors to mimic the glitching theme.

The tiniest headcaps and headbands!

Cover paper and endpapers marbled by @aetherseer

The typeset emphasizes the glitchiness throughout this segment of the episode. For the three stories, I color coded them in red, blue, and green, but there's a lot of overlapping between them to emulate the actual audio. I added a little more chaos to this specific typeset, compared to the one I submitted for the Tiny Books Bang.

Sansûkh (and Tasâlalkhud) by @determamfidd

I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating a lectern book basically since the moment I saw one, and what fic could fit the bill better than the most epic work in a very much epic fandom?

✨ Sansûkh retells the entire story of the Lord of the Rings and then some, so fitting all of it into a single volume was the kind of fuck around and find out idea that is common among ficbinders.

✨ So, I typeset the text in a two-column style, made it way smaller than what I usually go for (but still very much readable!), added footnotes (as opposed the original endnotes) with translation. It turned out to be 1200 pages, which I printed out twice (remember the fuck around and find out part? Textblocks over 10 cm thick do not fit into the guillotine I have access to, and using 70 gsm paper led to a textblock of just over 10 cm. So I had to scrap those 300 sheets of paper and start again with my trusty 60 gsm Ekko paper).

✨ So then, I painted the edges black, sewn 14 cm of endbands, and took a pong hard look at my life and my choices. The lecterb case was only made possible thanks to this fantastic doc by @spockandawe and @lootthecoyote's excellent mathing. I’m honestly amazed it turned out so great on the first try (ok, we did construct a mock-up first, but even it only had one mismeasured part and that 100% on me). I also made an inner cover so no parts of the textblock would show indecently. Also! The case even has inner endpapers (all theoretically visible parts are lined with the same paper I used for the actual endpapers, but taking picture of this whole Object was super awkward.)

✨ Not only did I foil the spine, there’s even a foiled design (matching the one on every spread of the pages) inside the Oxford hollow (that’s the creepy black tunnel between the textblock spine and the spine of the inner cover, you can see it in the first photo).

✨ And the most amazing part: it does the thing! Stands on its own, opens nicely and all that. (Though the pages are a bit too light to want to stay put, and you have to hold it open a bit).

(pls click photos for better quality)

Between what was and what will be stands James Tiberius Kirk, in all his fractured patchwork glory. Because saving the Federation was only the beginning.

This fic has been on my to-do list for a long time, and serendipitously got pushed up for me to do RIGHT NOW because I needed a fic I could use to demonstrate layering boards for cutouts for a class @pleasantboatpress and I taught for Binderary. @finalfrontierpublishing had a great typeset, so I rushed to get the text ready enough for the class demo that I could start the cover... and then things got out of hand. Whoops.

I started with a basic circle cutout for the globe, which then grew a secondary layer for me to sandwich copper wires into. Atlas got printed onto marbled paper and added in on top. Then I developed a plan to have the moon-earth orbits, etc on the cover...

...and I needed a sun & I had this awesome paper I decided to use for endpapers, so we get a stupid complicated paper inset too...

...and I had been meaning to try out French double core endbands so why not do those in the colors of the earth from space...

Annnnnd then I was going to a box-making class & this is the kind of delicate that kinda needs one. so. here we are!

bonus: that art peep in the background is a super awesome metal print by @natureintheory

Fanbinding: Merlin Ambrosius, King of Carthis by @clotpolesonly for Pia (Renegade Bindery Bound Fic Exchange 2024)

This was my actual first attempt at edge painting. Attempt 1 was to do gold foil with a hair dryer, which worked on my tests on thicker paper, but absolutely did not work here. I think I sanded it off like three times, after gluing all the pages together by accident at least once. I ended up resorting to acrylic paint, with a layer of acrylic ink over it for extra shiny.

Title page was mostly done by the heat foil head for the cricut, but for some reason it didn't do the last couple letters, so I stole a foil quill from a friend and traced them. The cover is also a foil quill: I made the design on Illustrator based on a pattern I found, and then printed and traced it.

The story with the endpaper is that I got it in 2012 at Hollanders (in person, moment of silence.) I loved it enough that I have not used it in the, uh, 11 intervening years. I finally decided that this had gone on a ridiculous amount of time, and also, it looked great with the cover. Problem: that paper really wasn't intended to be pressed against itself. It got itself extremely stuck every time the text block was in the press, and I had to very carefully pry it apart with a bone folder. (Eventually I remembered to start putting blank pages in between.)

The cover is moire, with a very cool sort of wavy pattern that doesn't quite come through in these photos. It's incredibly trippy to work with though because it throws off my depth perception:

I had the honor of binding two MDZS fics for @nebuluscharlie!

First up is Wild Creatures, a modern vampire AU. I did a three piece bradel for these guys to emphasize the black-and-red theme. It didn't photograph well but I used World Cloth red neon slub and that is one sexy bookcloth. I also used World Cloth black shantung for the spines.

The gold and silver HTV really popped on the spines.

Black and gold marbled momi for the endpapers.

Lots of red text! It was fun doing a modern design.

Next up is Home Sweet Home, a domestic home renovation AU! I did an overlay design with chiyogami paper in the inset, representing a window looking out onto the cherry blossom tree in their yard. Bookcloth is Dubletta blue.

To complement the pink cherry blossoms, I did pink cloth-wrapped endbands.

The endpapers are the same chiyogami cherry blossom pattern as in the cover, but in blue!

The window/cherry blossom theme continues in the typeset.