oh, hell, can't you let a feller sleep?

Rachel and Borne, from Borne, for @stackedcrates!

Reccer Spotlight: Rachel!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

The Storyteller's Death

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Rachel has you covered when you're in the mood for either gentle comfort or murder. You know, the two emotional states. Full text available in her tab of the Bella’s Book Club Summer Reading ‘26 Reclist.

more info on BBC Summer Reading 2026

Totally!! So i use a beefy paper guillotine, not one of the ones with a simple up and down lever on the blade, but one of the BIG boys that gives you a better mechanical advantage

It was a bit of an investment, but the single most useful piece of equipment I've bought for bookbinding!!

And i can speak to some of the other options too!! An xacto knife is going to give you more trouble than it feels like, because the length of the blade itself is pretty short. Once you get a little ways down into your text block, it's going to be REAL easy to go wandering away from your straight edge, or just for the handle to start bumping into things and causing problems.

I know that chisels are a classical solution for trimming books like this because they gave a long, flat surface that's nice and easy to slide along, but it is also relatively dangerous if you don't take care with your setup!! I used scrap wood and G clamps to try to chisel trim a book a while back, and let's just say the stability was... not good. I stopped after chiseling my knuckle pretty good, but i did recently buy a book press for giving this another go with the right equipment. You can also use specialized ploughs to trim like this, but chisels are probably a more affordable entry point.

But! Sanding is what i currently use when a book is too large to fit in my guillotine! And I know exactly what you mean about the pages bulging out. When im sanding a book, i clamp the edges of the pages HARD between scrap board and scrap wood and go from there with an orbital sander. It isn't a complete solution, I still find little fluffs of paper dust in the pages after I take it out, but it does give me enough to go on. The clamping I photographed here is for art rather than sanding, but it's a similar idea! I want the pages to he operating as a UNIT, i don't want them to be capable of separating and moving independently. For sanding, I don't use the carriage bolts, i use heavier duty clamps, but you can kind of see how clamping forces the text block to act more like a solid piece and less like individual leafs of paper

And I'll say, these days, im using an orbital sander and am picky about how flat things get, but one of my older edge painting projects is pretty UN-flat snd still worked extremely well! My single-volume tian guan ci fu was sanded by hand, which was a terrible idea and gave me so many blisters, and in the end, I didn't yet all of the sawtooth sanded out before I said it was good enough. You can still see the shadows of the little valleys on the left here. But it was still flat enough for a full art treatment! Once you clamp the edges and stop them from swelling, sanding can definitely get you to a good art surface one way or another (though i definitely recommend an orbital sander over your bare hands lmao)

The Bella's Book Club summer reading challenge is BACK for 2026! 📚🦜

BBC is gearing up for another year of summer reading! Have a book (or five) you think book club would enjoy? Now's your chance to recommend it!

How to participate:

Fill out the Google form by 11:59 PM EST June 13th, 2026 with up to five of your recommendations! These can be your own favorites, books you think go with Twilight or the Gothic genre, books you're dying to talk about, plays, poetry, graphic novels, or nonfiction! Almost anything goes except for:

Books/authors that BBC has already read or that already appear on Bella's list from Midnight Sun

Fanfiction (save it for the Bonus Rec section!)

2. When the compiled rec list is posted on June 14th, choose five or so of your fellow BBC readers' recs and read them by mid-September! Come chat about your picks in the BBC Discord, or link us to your Goodreads/Storygraph/Tumblr review. We'll also be running the challenge on Storygraph so you can track your progress.

Didn't get to read everything you wanted to from our 2023-2025 reclists? No worries, they're eligible for this year's challenge too! While you're at it, check out previous years' reccer spotlights 💡

Happy reccing! 🎉🌺