Bookbinding: How Dare You!? / Cheng He Ti Tong by Qi Ying Jun
I also made this for @spockandawe for an exchange! But I wanted to bind it myself, too. Would you believe I made it halfway through this novel before realizing it was by the same author as Are You OK? (the author's name is different on different platforms I guess?) I was like "this author's doing some very neat stuff with transmigration ... hey, wait a sec!"
Since the concept of this novel is transmigrating into a transmigration novel, I made a triple-layer cutout cover. The outermost cover is the "original" novel, followed by the in-universe transmigration novel, and finally the actual novel, where instead of a proper cover design it gets a hastily-written* sharpie title on note paper.
I was going to put more colors in the endbands and fewer in the splatter-painted edges, but it turns out if you only use brown paint for splattered edges ... even if it is a very nice brown in other contexts ... it looks like the book is moldy. So I added some blue too and at that point I thought a multicolored endband would be too much.
My laser printer can't print to the edges of the pages, so for the floral background, I printed just the border on my inkjet printer, and then printed the text of those specific pages afterwards.
There is a typographical easter egg! If you've read the novel, you can see if you can figure it out (it's present on one of the pages pictured here).
*actually I wrote it it about ten times before getting a version I liked enough to use
I made this copy for an exchange and in honor of the drama coming out, I pulled my own copy out of wip hell to finish it! Same design but a different color scheme due to messing up some materials





















