celestial fanatic

This initially wasn’t going to be a hardcover binding; I was actually thinking about doing a Japanese-style binding. It’s a fairly short fic, and I already had some ideas brewing. I’d even bought some paper for that purpose and sketched some of the ideas I had. But once I knew I could use Anticia’s illustrations, I realized that that binding style wouldn’t quite allow those illustrations to shine, at least not at my current level of experience. So, I switched to a hardcover binding. Properly incorporating the illustrations into the typeset was a new, but fun experience!

I also decided this would be the book where I would try making a dust jacket. It’d be a cool new thing to try, AND a great way to simultaneously use Anticia’s cover illustration and execute some ideas of my own. It also meant I could leave out the summary page I usually include in these bindings, which felt a little weird

Disjoint is fairly short compared to most of the other books I’ve made, and for a while I wasn’t quite sure there’d be enough pages for a hardcover binding, but thankfully there were!

Making the book block was mostly quick and uneventful. Though, the thing that should’ve been the easiest part, trimming it, became the most troublesome. I don’t have the tools to trim a book block myself, so I usually let a local printing shop do it for me. However, they had closed for a few weeks, and I was under pressure to finish this book roughly within a week. I actually traveled to a nearby city to see if any print shops there could trim the book block! It was a very fun experience because my walk to both print shops took me through parts of the city I hadn’t ever seen before.

Since the dust jacket would have an illustration and the title and everything, I decided the design on the cover itself would be simple. Since the fic is about Bruno, I wanted to add elements reminiscent of his character design. The obvious choice was replicating his suit pattern, which was a nice and easy change of pace from previous cover designs.

Also! An idea left over from my initial idea and modified a bit, a reading ribbon with one of Bruno’s zippers attached to it. Like the cover pattern, it wasn’t difficult to make but I had a lot of fun. I cut out the base shape from some really thick black paper, and cut the details from some nice textured gold-colored paper, and glued those together. I thought I’d use my screw punch to make a hole to pull the ribbon through, but the hole I’d included in the cutting pattern was big enough for me to use a needle to thread the ribbon through. Once that was done, I tied the ribbon into a knot and glued the loose end to the ribbon to make things look a little neater. Probably could’ve just glued the ribbon to itself without the knot, but whatever

The dust jacket was both easier and more trouble than I expected to make. I thankfully didn’t need to adjust the illustration’s size much to have it wrap around the spine and still look good, but I still needed to reprint it a couple of times (I’d made some easily fixable goofs which showed up more obviously on paper than on my screen XD). My old-ass printer also didn’t care for the slightly sturdier printing paper I wanted to use, so I had to use regular paper instead. After all that, though, I just cut off the excess parts, folded the dust jacket around the cover. I was done, and right on time too!

This project was an absolute delight. Especially after my previous binding went awry at the very end, this was perfect to cheer me up again. Making the book block didn’t take nearly as long, and the cover design was a lot easier to figure out. At the same time, I got to try tons of new things! Integrating illustrations into the text, making a little charm to attach to the reading ribbon, and making a dust jacket! This book really feels like it’s got a bit more character when compared to some of my previous bindings, and not just because it’s a fanfic and binding centered around one fictional character in particular ;p