Hinterwald Druck

Here's the author's summary:

Carrot is named King. Of the Dwarfs. He doesn't want to be king. His nomination is really just a nasty case of Ambition and Politics on the part of some upstart dwarfs. Still, he needs to be very careful how he handles this. Accepting the throne means war. Rejecting...probably also means war. Help comes from an unexpected source when Cheery Littlebottom offers up a unique proposal. If these ambitious dwarfs want a king, then maybe they should be forced to accept a queen, as well.

Their kind-of-fake dating for political reasons develops in a really nice and sweet way, and to me was really romantic and spoke a lot to me, so I decided to go with a full on romance theme visually: red colour and heart cutout on the outside of the book, as something people see at first when looking at them. In the story, that's also kind of the way they present their fake relationship to others.

I chose the marbled paper in the heart because it reminded me of stone, of actual marble, and I wanted to show how their story in this fic is such a deeply dwarfish story (so, a heart of gemstones in a way), even though both Carrot and Cheery are doing "being a dwarf" wrong, in some other dwarves' eyes.

An element of the story that really moved me was the practical way in which they deal with their situation and relationship, while still giving room to their actual feelings. An important part of that was the discworld-dwarfish way they deal with the topic of finances, namely in comparing their ledgers. When handling the book, the closer we get to the story itself, the closer we also get to it visually, so I created a ledger background in LibreOfficeCalc:

I tried finding fonts that were close to what I know from my discworld books, and chose the cursive style because it reminded me of blackboard writing in school, and the importance of written words in discworld dwarf culture. And, of course, footnotes!

And at least, a few WIP pictures:

I tried trimming and sanding again this time:

I'm quite pleased with the result; as I don't have a guillotine or even a good knife, I'm making do with a box cutter. I trimmed the signatures before sewing, which is why they're slightly uneven, but it doesn't bother me, as the end result is still quite smooth. Compare to the teeth my previous book has:

Also I like the spine curve of the new one better (the one above).

Casing in is still my weak spot:

As you can see, the text block is not in the middle, but higher than it should be. This is because I haven't tried making paste yet, and I use PVA even for casing in, which means that I literally have just 1 try to get it right because it dries so quickly.

On the other hand, my endpapers are looking better (less creased) than before:

Alas, I cut them slightly too narrow ... because I used a sheet of paper as measurement that apparently was slightly narrower than A4??

The typeset has at least 2 errors that I only noticed now: at one point I missed the place where a footnote had been that I didn't carry over, so there's a random ⁵ after a word, and worse, a line break in a place where it shouldn't be. And then, apparently, the author used curved quotation marks MOST of the time but sometimes also straight quotation marks, which I didn't catch before.

All of which doesn't bother me that much, but it's going to be something to look out for the next time.

Casing in went reasonably well in the front, but I got some very noticeable creases at the back. Also, moisture from the glue in the endpaper.

Happy with how the spine turned out

Although it's a bit wonky when I open the book.

All it's missing is a title label, and I haven't decided if I'm going to try a spine label in this size.