I bind books :)

As they shouted out with glee,

"Unholy Drink Cloaca

The Renegade Bookbinding Guild is proud to announce we are officially a 501c3 educational nonprofit! This is a significant and exciting milestone for Renegade! Renegade’s official non-profit status allows us to support the growth of our various events as they become more money and resource intensive. Renegade's focus as a nonprofit is on building community, providing education, and promoting preservation of written works.

To read more about this very exciting announcement, information is on the Renegade Bookbinding Guild website, along with details about the updates to guild membership.

501c3 Status Update

Renegade Bookbinding Guild's current board can be viewed at the link below.

The Board

Renegade can now receive tax-deductible donations!

Donate Here

Renegade will NOT move any resources behind a membership "paywall" or in any way limit current or future resources in the Renegade Bindery Discord server.

Renegade is currently recruiting volunteers to assist in the Binderary Mods & Website Designers roles, among others!

Volunteer Applications

both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)

typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:

(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.

the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)

uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)

anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)

a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:

the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)

a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):

i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)

the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:

as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.

and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):

with specifically the highlights and colors being hues that compliment each other, don’t distract from the scene, and make it more interesting/visually appealing

cohesive but still contrasting

This kind of talks about color and composition

This is a bit about landscape specifically

Values & composition

Contrast in composition

Balance in colors & values

This one's more for palette building but I think it's useful and can be applied to the other ones

Cohesion within compositions/lighting

"Chromatic fringe" - I also see people using this with shading, they bring in a transition color that is a different hue than the base color or shadow, it makes it so that less vibrancy is lost and it doesn't get muddy!

This one specifically has a lot of process behind the style of painting you're looking for!

Also one of my favorite artists who makes bright and colorful art like this is Not Sorry Art on TikTok & YouTube, her website is here and it's<3 my fav. She has some videos where you can see her process

Longstitch binding

https://youtu.be/a_LZ-BWhH_Q

2)Japanese Binding

https://youtu.be/j-r6c_trSxY

3) Belgian Binding

https://youtu.be/w-oct9Ttp1g

4) Coptic stitch binding

https://youtu.be/TdHo8NtDOXc

5) Case Bookbinding

https://youtu.be/Av_rU-yOPd4

About two-thirds were transgender boys, meaning boys who had been assigned a female gender at birth; about one-third were transgender girls.

Solely on the social transition front, Olson noted that over five years only about 7% of the children transitioned back at least once.

By the end of the study period, 94% of the kids continued to identify as the gender they had embraced when first socially transitioning. (That figure includes the just over 1% who had at one point re-transitioned back to their birth gender, before then returning back again to the gender to which they had initially transitioned.)

Of the 6% who did not stick with their initial transition, a little more than 3% described themselves as non-binary by the end of the study period, while just under 3% said they identified with their birth gender. (Identifying with one’s birth gender was notably more common among kids who had socially transitioned before the age of 6.) “Interestingly, we are (italics) not (end italics) finding that the youth who re-transitioned in our study are experiencing that as traumatic,” Olson noted. “We’ve been finding that when youth are in supportive environments — supportive in the sense of being OK with the exploration of gender — both the initial transition and a later re-transition are fine.”

Indeed, “socially transitioning youth are [simply] making the same ‘decisions’ that cisgender children are making, in that they are seeking clothes, hairstyles, names, accessories, activities and playmates that reflect their gender identity and the resources in their community,” said Matt Goldenberg, a psychologist in adolescent medicine with the Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic.” End description]

Not that “we can’t let you transition because what if you change your mind, you might become as miserable as you are now with much the same opportunities for fixing it” ever made any sense as a concern in the first place.