This page took the wrong turn || @lia404 || Amateur bookbinder and fanbinder since 2022, for better or worse || Member of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild || ESL. FR/ES OK!
This is my bookbinding blog; I created it to use as a portfolio, as a place where I can reblog resources or binds that inspire me, as a way to communicate with creators whose works I bind, and most of all, as a place to write about my process so I hopefully don't forget for later projects.
This inevitably leads to long posts filled with rambling, so I'm going to try and keep this "About me" pinned message shorter.
You can follow me on my main, @lia404, if you want to know me (and my most recent hyperfixations) better. My asks are also open, and so are the comments beneath my posts. Don't hesitate.
All my binds are under the tag #Bookbinding 404.
Beneath the cut, you'll find my answers to frequently asked questions regarding my imprint, my journey through bookbinding, my ethos for fanbinding, and my stance on commissions.
My imprint
Erratum Paginae (the mistake of the page) is the name I picked for my press, as I have been going by the name "404" for about 20 years now. I made the logo by myself on Affinity Designer, freehanding the mouse—as a huge mouse lover, this is a personal design I've been drawing on basically any paper surface I could find for the past 30 years. The font is Chasing Miracles by Damarletter, for which I have a Standard License covering the non-commercial use of the logo. The (amazing! spectacular!) banner was drawn by @wisyhana, who managed to capture the exact atmosphere of my dream workshop.
I am a member of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild and abide by its Code of Conduct.
Bookbinding
While I tried to pick up bookbinding multiple times in my life, through many various clumsy ways, I finally got the actual means to fully dive into the hobby in 2022. I first went through the incredible resources provided by Renegade, before facing the fact that I lacked the structure I needed to really make something I'd like. (That, and I needed something in my mother tongue, let's face it.)
I joined a bookbinding workshop in Paris in 2023 and have been a member there since. I bookbind a minimum of 2 hours a week. It could be a lot for a hobby, but it somehow became necessary for my own sanity. Some people go to the gym twice a week; I typeset, sew, glue, press books. I can't recommend it; it's terrible and does nothing for my body and clutter my bookshelves and desk, but for some reason it works to keep me sane, so it's still worth it. (I do wish I'd go to the gym as often as I glued a case upside down, though.)
As English is not my mother tongue, I am more used to French bookbinding terminology and will likely make mistakes in my blog. I'm still putting in the effort to write my posts in English, so please be kind?
Fanbinding
I'll probably write a full post about fanbinding later, but here's a quick one for now. I'm not going to give a definition, Fanlore already has an excellent one. The RBG Code of Conduct also covers most aspects of my approach. If I had to summarise, here are my three main motivators:
— Legitimity: I've been told multiple times, by authors whose books I bound, "it feels like my story is a real book, I feel like a real writer now."
It always makes me a little sad, because... Fanfiction writers are writers. Their stories are legitimate books. They deserve their place on a bookshelf like any other book does. It saddens me that people tend to only see a book as a "real book" when it is physical (especially now that ebooks are common), but if fanbinding provides legitimity both through the eyes of non-fandom-knowledgeable people AND (most of all) through the eyes of the very writers of these stories, then it's worth doing it.
— Reciprocity: fanfic writers and artists give so much to fandoms. It only feels natural to give back in whatever way I can. If bookbinding allows me to put a smile on the face of someone who poured their heart and soul into a 300k-word coffeeshop AU I basically learnt by heart throughout the years I read and reread it, then you bet I'm going to do it. I can only hope it carries them through their hardships the way their story carried me through mine.
— Archiving purpose: so many fanworks get deleted over the years. While the OTW does an outstanding work at archiving, nothing guarantees I'll still have access to their resources later in my life. I've lost too many stories that were important to me in the past, and fanbinding allows me to keep close to me the ones that have not Forever Disappeared. The Internet can burn; I'll still have my 200k time travel epic AU at hand to love and cherish and reread when I'm depressed.
Commissions
I've been asked about commissions a few time: do I take commissions?
Short answer: no, I don't.
Longer answer: I bookbind as a hobby, I am in no way a professional and I intend to keep it this way. It's something that brings me joy and makes my heart light, it's also a fantastic personal coping mechanism, and I refuse for it to bring the weight of expectations that comes with paid work.
What I do, however, is agree to work on projects. I've done bookbinding projects for friends multiple times already: be it a design for notebooks, binding (or re-binding) a book they like, typesetting something they wrote... So long as it's fun, it's understood that I'm not doing it professionnally, that there is no expectation of a perfect quality at the end, and provided I have time, I could be game. If you have a project you'd like to work on with me, my asks are open. I just can't promise I'll accept; in all honesty, there's little chance I will.
I don't want to get paid for my binding. However, depending on projects, I might ask for help to cover fees: paper, toner, sometimes tools... If it's the case, I will provide the invoices of what I paid with the money I was given. I am not getting a salary from it. I'm just having fun learning new things.
And that's it for now! If you have any other question, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.
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I felt sad, so I made myself a simple coptic notebook using my cute chiyogami that a friend brought from Japan, just to prove myself that I could still do it.
Now it's 1h30 later, I'm still sad, but I have the cutest bunny poorly-coptic-stiched notebook EVER.
Now that the gift copies have been received, I can share the fun project I completed for the Renegade 2026 Tiny Book Bang!
Decathlon, by @owlswatch, is a Destiny fanfiction inspired by a playlist of 10 songs. @flowers-of-io's typeset went very sci-fi feel, so I decided to pick up the aesthetic and run with it for the cover. Nothing says old-school sci-fi like textured matte silver and shinny miror-y things.
With how important the songs were to the writing of the story, it felt like only adding a link inside the book was not impactful enough: I wanted to make sure they were part of the bind too. This led me to shaping the book like this, with a Swiss bind (I've been obsessed with Swiss binding lately, it's just So Nice to make) that allowed to add a little something on the other side... At first I wanted mini-discs, but these are hard to come by and barely anyone has what's needed to read them anyway, so I instead went for some of these USB cards that fit in the wallet—or inside a book cover!
I stitched the black paper I used as liner to turn it into a tiny pocket, put all the songs on the cards, added the logo in black vinyle, slipped the card in the cover-pockets and then did a little dance when I saw that what I had in mind was working. It's just so satisfying when everything comes together like this.
The bookcloth is Ratchford's Inspiration silver; the marbled paper is a delightful accidental find in a tiny shop by my sister-in-law's place, and the mirror on the cover is actually Active Paper UK's SUPER SHINY 90gsm adhesive silver mirror which I had been dying to find an excuse to use, so stars aligned.
Thanks a lot to the organisers of the TBB this year again, to qualichor for the typeset and to bioluminesce for giving the authorisation to bind the fic in the first place!
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A special project for a special person and a special story!
Six months ago today, @scorp2510 posted the story KIA - Killed In Action, kickstarting the series Between Stars and Silver Rails.
A month later, I found out about it by some incredible stroke of luck and I fell deep. This VLD/HSR crossover was eveything I dreamt of, and even more I didn't dare hope for. It didn't even take me a week to take on a project for a fun typeset and bind for the first story of the series that was completed, File Code: HSS-CR-Δ-07.
Today, it's been officially six months, and the series is now over 360k words long, with 12 works (6 one-shots, 2 complete multichapter stories, 4 running multichapter stories. Also, some Easter eggs on my part, as a fun addition.)
I am 9 chapters late in reading, 5 chapters late in writing, as my current life does not really allow me to sit down and read/write. But I am stubborn, and I refused to not celebrate this milestone.
It is thus time for me to reveal another project that was in the works since the story was completed, but that I could only complete yesterday (right on time!): Marion's Adventure Book.
Marion is Scorp's Honkai: Star Rail OC, a sweet boy with the heart in the right place but clumsy morals. He's a Memokeeper who relies a lot on art to gather memories, and, most of all, who has synaesthesia.
The bind itself is Japanese stab binding with my faithful Dubletta Purple Blue, with a scrap of flower-patterned lokta paper that Scorp had admired on another of my binds not long ago, and the inside is golden chiyogami brought back from Japan by a friend. Everything was laser printed on sketchbook paper to keep the idea of Marion's drawing book. Lots of colours for a colourful child!
The typeset was a little of a challenge: since Marion has synaesthesia, colours are very important for him. I thus decided to put all the names of colours... in their colour. Except, here's the caveat: I'm kinda colourblind. A little. So there was a lot of trial and errors. And whining about colours to my ever-patient partner.
Additionally, Marion's story is not (surprise surprise) only a happy, carefree one. At some points, Marion is at risk to lose his colours: for this, I chose to desaturate the colourful chapter title pages as the story went, until the colours came back. I also toyed around with adding some effects on words, that seem very logical intradiegetically but were hell on the printer.
It still sort of works. Another win for FAAFO.
I wanted to keep the feeling of a children story, with pastel painting and fairytale elements, even if it's not all fairytales in Marion's troubled life.
I went for a very round font, easy to read and with childbook feels (Comic Neue), that I pimped a little by adding touches of:
- Century (for a formal but elegant style, when talking about Marion's Knight and his companion)
- Coral Pixels and Aardvark Cwm Type (for a glitchy feel, when talking about the distortion or fragmented things)
- Christmas Garden (for an elegant, flowery twist on the Garden of Recollection)
- Austie Bost You Wear Flowers (for cute flowers in chapter titles),
- Asian Girl and 2 Much Coffee (for handwritten things.)
The spacing wasn't easy. I usually make my typeset in a very classic way: no big line breaks, everything justified and square. Here, I went with something looser, to go with the representation of Marion's free spirit through Scorp's words and formatting.
Two mishaps, alas: a small guillotine accident that cut off the page numbers, and... falling short of the paper I decided to print on, which led to me having to switch and the 20 last pages being a slightly creamier colour.
Honestly, considering everything, I feel like I'm lucky it wasn't worse. Looking back, this is way too thick for an efficient stab binding, even with boards.
And yet: it still works.
So, there: Happy 6month-versary, KIAverse, Seventh and Marion! And thank you, @scorp2510, for filling my life with this incredible universe of yours!
Fanbinding: i know where to draw the line by magneticwave
This was for my local Heated Rivalry fanbinding exchange (everyone picks a fic and gets a random one; no prior matches or references.) I wanted to stick with my exchange tradition of trying new things, so this was "horizontal stripes that go around the spine." If there's a better word for that I don't know it.
What I did was I glued the boards and spine to brown paper first, and then put the fabric on top; that way they didn't overlap each other, which I thought would make it hard to open, but also means there weren't any gaps around the hinge because it's all glued down.
I learned from my Moby Dick mistakes and glued the fabric on in top-down order, instead of color by color, so that I wouldn't have to cut the middle strip with insane precision. I didn't get the edge quite as clean as I'd like to have; I need to put little grippy feet on my ruler so that it doesn't slide. Normally my lines do not matter this much.
Chapter heading page is, of course, a goal, and the endpapers are the only red and blue paper I had, which excited then disappointed @english-mace when she learned that nobody in the fic does any murders.
Midnight Strangers by Mitos (@seriouslycalamitous)
It’s finally done!!! This is officially the thickest book I’ve bound to date, coming in at 828 pages (796 of the fic itself). The Oxford hollow + bradel combination worked so well to support the textblock’s weight, and the foiled faux leather is super pretty, so I’m really happy with how everything turned out! I’ve learned a lot over the course of binding this that I will absolutely be using for my next thick bind.
I know myself well enough to know I would not be very good at fanbiding and that would mainly frustrate me, so while I love fan binding and admire those who do it, I've never dabbled.
I have never regretted that decision more than I did waking up from the dream I recently had, where I excitedly bought a rare copy of the novel that Goncharov (1973) was based on, opened it up, and found that it was a hollowed out "book safe" for keeping valuables in.
@copperbadge were you looking for the Goncharov novel ?
I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.
(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)
It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰
Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:
Just kidding.
It holds only the air of regret and disappointment.
This bind is probably my best example of "Everything that could go wrong... but it's fine in the end" so far.
For the 2025 Renegade Typesetting Exchange, @tinwhiskerpress made a typeset of my favourite Klapollo fanfiction, Words Come Fluently by ItsyRoyal. It's a music industry AU with tons of social media elements and a healthy dose of the secret/mistaken identity trope. And finally, here it is, all bound and ready to go on my shelf!
Except it was an adventure and a half to reach this state.
First, my mistake 100%: the typeset was meant to be A5, but I'm out of short grain A4 paper for A5 books (which is a tragedy I need to remedy QUICK), so I did an A6 book. The size of the font made it work, I was happy with it.
For some reason, my printer skewed the print. It wouldn't have been such a big problem in A5, but it became visible in A6. Printer, why?!
Then, I didn't stabilise my guillotine before cutting. Again, 100% my mistake. But my text block ended up cut even more askew. At this point, I was left with the painful question:
DO I GO ON, DO IT START OVER, DO I GIVE UP?
I'm not a quitter. I have limited amounts of paper. I decided to go on.
After re-trimming, the text block straightened a little, and I figured having a straight book cover might help compensate.
It did! Mostly.
Except. Since it was an AU centred on the fame of the Gavinners, I wanted a cover that would be glittery, flashy. I used a paper with lots, LOTS of glitter for endpages and I layered it on the cover with a cut-up bookcloth that shines a nice gold shifting into purple. It felt like the perfect fit, right?
Except: the paper was too thin, the glue sipped through, the bookcloth got stained. BADLY stained. I tried to salvage it by adding "grunge like" dots of gold.
This was NOT working. This was awful. I was so unhappy with it.
Still not a quitter, but I had other types of bookcloth. And most of all, I had a piece of fabric I'd been meaning to use for forever: shiny, thick, HOLO. (I have told you I love holo, right? Yeah, thought so.)
Scrap the cover, cut the endpages, tidy the text block, let's do it again.
(It's always a little painful)
I printed and glued new endpages. What I had NOT anticipated: the cloth I picked was heavier than I thought. Like, really heavy. And the end pages were too thin.
It tore.
Sunk cost fallacy at this point. I had a nice shiny cover, a perfectly decent text block. I wouldn't let endpages get me down.
I had some decorated paper, thicker than I usually use for endpages, but thought it might be the occasion. It took... a lot of glue. And possibly a bit of tape. I'm not 100% proud. BUT. It holds.
Finally, I managed to complete the bind with adhesive vynil cut with my Silhouette Cameo. And this, for once, worked exactly as intended.
So, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Multiple times. But I'm glad I can finally have this book on my shelf! Thanks for the typeset, @tinwhiskerpress, and thanks for the fic, Itsy!
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ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves
back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore
if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??
don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM
so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!
this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together
and then in the end you put it together like this!!
and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy
EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!
Maedhros wakes up again, on the first morning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
Of course, nobody calls it that. For them, it hasn't happened yet.
Approximately one million years later, here is my project from the yearly Renegade Exchange! Truly, this fic was such a pleasure to work on. I bound this one fandom blind-ish, which is to say that I had the passing familiarity with LOTR that any D&D player / child who read any fantasy she could get her hands on has. I did very much come out of this bind with a new found love for a bunch of dysfunctional elves. Love those guys, and love this incredible fic.
About the Bind
Text Block: 20/50 lb cream short grain
Endpapers: Indian Marbles in Gold/Silver on Black (~125 gsm), prepared as made endpapers
Case Style: three piece in-boards bradel binding, covered with Verona bookcloth in coal
Cover and Titling: foiled using the WRMK foil quill attachment with a Silhouette Portrait 3 and only a medium amount of swearing and threatening the vinyl cutter with bodily harm
Additional typeset pictures, as well as progress pictures and construction / design notes below the cut.
This is, far and away, the most involved bind I've done so far. That means that I have way more to say about it than I usually do, and I also have a few progress pictures (which is rare for me). So, if y'all will indulge me a little:
Typeset
The typeset was pretty standard fair, complete with my ongoing love affair with running footers. I also had a little bit of fun with footnotes on the copyright page.
Finding a good titling font was... involved. I didn't want to just use The Lord Of The Rings Font (TM), and only a few of the LOTR-inspired fonts I found did anything for me. And then, as an additional complicating factor, I had chosen to set the parenthetical portions of the chapter titles as subtitles, and let me tell you: LOTR-inspired fonts have got descenders for days. They are about 60% descenders by volume, which simply doesn't play nicely with subtitles. Got a very lucky break when a fellow binder suggested checking out uncial fonts, and eventually landed on one I really liked. I also broke my own personal rule about not using a different cap for titling vs drop caps, but I wanted something more decorative, and I found a nice uncial style illustrated drop cap that still matched pretty well.
The other design complication for title page and, more importantly, the cover, was the damn Tengwar. Now, I would absolutely describe myself as a nerd. I simply play too many table top games for that to not be true. But what I've never been is a language nerd. The first step (getting the Tengwar transcription) wasn't so hard. I used Tecendil for all of it (and if there are any transcription errors, well... I did my best). But trying to 1) find a Tengwar font that plays nicely with Affinity Publisher and 2) learn how to type correctly in that Tengwar font was.... God. That was a week long endeavor. As it turns out, there is one (1) Tengwar font that Affinity Publisher can render correctly, and that font is Alcarin Tengwar. I'm not going explain why because this post is already going to be long enough as is, but I will at least save the rest of you the trouble of the trial and error that took me.
Covers
For the cover design, I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to do from the beginning, although I did try one alternate version. As usual, all the design work was done in Affinity Designer. (This one also definitely tested my ability to work with my own vectors vs just using other people's vectors.) Regardless, I knew that I wanted to incorporate the idea of "unspooling" or "unraveling." This is a timeloop fix it fic, and I wanted to get that feeling of the new story overwriting the tragedy of the old.
With the importance of Maedhros being able to save Fingon within the story, I keyed in on the moment in The Silmarillion where he dies and foiled those lines in silver:
At last Fingon stood alone with his guard dead about him; and he fought with Gothmog, until another Balrog came behind and cast a thong of fire about him. Thus fell the High King of the Noldor, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood.
Now, the moment I pulled from A Thread Unraveled isn't exactly the same moment, but it is the moment in the fic where I think Fingon is saved for good within the loops:
He deserves to live. He is valiant, and good, and I know that he deserves more than death as his reward. He deserves everything I can give him and more, and he doesn't end here. He cannot end here. Please. See us. See what we have become. I know I have done wrong. I know there is so much I can never make right. I know it. But I am trying. I love him, and I am trying. He loves me, and so I am trying. Is it enough? If you are listening, if you can hear me, please. Have mercy for the Eldar and their love. In the darkness of his mind he sees silver, and blue. The stars as they first emerge in the dusk sky. As Grond reaches the highest point of the swing, Fingon so small on the ground beneath him, Thorondor appears out of the breaking clouds and dives for Morgoth’s face.
And besides, "Have mercy for the Eldar and their love" is a line that really stuck with me after reading the fic. This section is what I foiled onto the cover in gold. High concept design? A bit. But I gotta have fun somehow.
The actual covers were foiled using my Silhouette and a fine tip WRMK foil pen. I messed up two transfers over the course of making three books, but I didn't run out of foil OR bookcloth, so [through gritted teeth] that's fine.
The Text Block
Ah, the text block. Now this is where we started to get a bit fancy with it. After the usual round of glue, rounding, and backing, I started experimenting with some edge decoration techniques. One of my guiding design principles for this bind was the idea of light: this is a story that's preoccupied with finding the light in the darkness in both a philosophical sense and in the very physical "finding a Silmaril" sense. So I had in my head this image of sort of iridescent blue edges. The problem was getting there.
I settled on acrylic inks for my color, mostly because I was scared of accidentally gluing a text block closed with acrylic paint. In general, I have actually really liked working with inks. My method still needs some refinement to eliminate the tendency for inks feather a little into the pages, but they produce incredibly vibrant colors. That said, at least at my local craft store, there weren't any blue metallic inks. And even if there were, that's glittery, not necessarily iridescent. To get myself the rest of the way there, I started playing around with a colorshift acrylic glaze.
IF YOU'D LIKE TO SEE PROGRESS PICTURES FOR THE COLORSHIFT GLAZE, PLEASE CLICK ON THIS IMGUR LINK. TUMBLR KEEPS FLAGGING THESE IMAGES AS EXPLICIT FOR REASONS THAT ARE ABSOLUTELY BEYOND ME.
Now this is a really interesting material that I'm looking forward to experimenting with more. The pictures above are from my test block with the glaze layered over black ink. With all of the edges, I watered the glaze down with some distilled water (mostly due to the aforementioned terror of gluing my text block closed—I still took the block out of the press and fanned it immediately after application). I was reasonably happy with the results, but the problem I consistently ran into is that if you just look at the edges dead on, you don't really get the effect. The light has to hit them just right. (It also makes these edges a pain to try to photograph.) Additionally, this glaze sheds glitter like a motherfucker. I contained the glitter with a coat of watered down acrylic medium, but my success rate with that was variable. Some of the edges turned out great, some of them got a bit cloudy. That might be my stupid glossy acrylic medium at play again, or maybe something else entirely. More experimentation needed.
At any rate, some of them turned out better than others. This is one of the actual text blocks, with the glaze layered over a prussian blue acrylic ink. On the whole, I'm happy with the results, they just aren't quite as eyecatching as I was hoping.
The last new technique I tried out on this bind was handsewn endbands. I've had the materials for a while, but actually figuring out the process intimdiated me for a while, so I'd been putting it off. Turns out that they're actually not too hard to do!
These are faux double core endbands sewn with two strands of embroidery floss held together over a leather core. Lots of little mistakes, especially on my personal copy (which I did first... so that I could make all of my mistakes on it), but very happy with the results.
And that's all I've got to say! I worked on these pretty much non stop for three months, and I'm very proud of them and also very glad they're done. On to the next project!
(Actually it's part 1.1 since I split up and re- sized Vol. 1 for more convenient transportation and reading.)
Full cloth binding with title hot stamped on the spine and UV ink decoration on the front edge.
Frontispiece by @quill-q
case materials
2,4 binders board (covers)
coated book cloth, black (covering material)
matte silver heat reactive foil (hot stamped title)
inner book
Munken polar, 100gms (book body paper)
Chiyogami paper (endpapers)
button hole silk (endbands)
UV ink, Blue ghost by Noodler's ink (fore edge decoration)
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoy the design I chose. (It also makes me stupidly happy you immediately recognised the chapter dividers for what they are.)
I completely forgot to add a format or anything else that helps to discern the size.
This small chonk stands ~10,5 cm tall (that’s around 4,1"). With a total of 561 pages it contains the stories from 'Prologues' to ' Anbu trials - After the Tornado'. The next one will very likely just consist of the missing ‘Demon Mission’.
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, includind myself.
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? 💖)
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quite hypothetically, how do you feel about your fanfictions being printed and bound into physical books? i don’t think i have the materials to do this but i was thinking about it because i love your work so much and figured it worth asking. it’s obviously okay if you aren’t okay with that!!
oh wow, honestly I'd be flattered and honoured! If you ever get the means to in future then go for it (and send me a pic hehe)
Something simple for once.
My sister-in-law came to me with a project she wanted done as a gift for a friend: she had gathered free recipes from la Compagnie anglaise des thés and le Palais des thés into a homemade typeset, and wanted to know if I had ideas to bind it.
You bet I did.
Three piece bradel binding, the endpages are chiyogami, the cover is Colorado bookcloth from Ratchford with marbled paper inlays, that I lined with a gold pen.
It turns out the Colorado bookcloth has really clean cuts with my Silhouette Cameo—now I only have to figure out how to get rid of the glue stains... It will come with experience!
