Binderary is an event run by the Renegade Bindery’s discord server that is essentially a bookbinding intensive with online classes and workshops and everyone setting their own goals - whether that is finishing X number of books, mastering a new technique, or putting a dent in their work-in-progress pile. This was my third year participating in Binderary and turned into the year of typesetting on the fly and sewn-in endpapers.
This year, like last year, I bound 12 books. Unlike 2025, where I started the month with a few books already printed out and a slew of typesets in reserve, this year I got a late start because of travel and only started with four typesets prepped. I blew through those fairly quickly and spent my lunch-breaks for the rest of the month frantically formatting fics, and made my goal just under the wire.
Binderary Stats! 12 books bound (3 folios, 4 legal quartos, 3 letter quartos, 2 octavos), making 652,621 words in 2,925 pages. 6 of the books were multi-work anthologies and 6 were single-fic volumes, with a duology included for variety. There were 9ish fandoms represented, with 6 of the books being crossovers. Only one author copy this time around, and in the end I’ve added around 9 inches of books to my shelf during this event. Thankfully I've acquired another bookshelf for this hobby, so I'm not in danger of running out of room from this event.
Like last year, all supplies were from stash. I used up the last of my cobalt Allure bookcloth and finally finished a pack of scrapbook paper I bought at the dollar store about 20 years ago. I also used up just over 100g of PVA, which made the level in my glue jar go down by nearly an inch (and that doesn’t include the methyl cellulose mix I was casing in with for the bigger books).
I'll be adding posts for the individual books in drips and drabs. It may take a while to get everything photographed with how gloomy things have been here recently. In the meantime, here's a cat.
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So it's March, which means another Binderary has passed. And I did...the least amount of binding in any Binderary.
IDK for reasons. I had multiple health episodes/scares. I had three kittens, two recovering from neutering. I had a sick cat that we thought was terminal for a while (she's okay for now, though we know it won't be too long for her.)
It was a bad month, in other words.
What I actually did, was finish one book, that was a WIP from LAST YEAR'S Binderary. I posted that separately in my last post.
I also made and did leather covers for 4 volumes of Kaleidoscope of Death. But got held up when it came time to do the titling. But yanno, progress on that year plus long project.
And I sewed two typesets back at the beginning of the month when I had ambition still. One I abandoned because I mangled it too badly with the guillotine. The other is still in progress. I cut the boards to size and finished the textblock fully. So it would only take a little work to finish. . .
Anyway, so that was my Binderary. I also helped with a couple of workshops but wasn't able to watch very many because they were mostly scheduled at inconvenient times for me, so I have a lot to catch up on.
Yall. It has been over a year since I last did any bookbinding due to life being A Whole Lot And Then Some (picked up crochet in the meantime which has been fun! but not the same) but it's another year, another Binderary, and we are BACK. Spent a week of being home sick working on a typeset, then this weekend worked on binding my first ever sextidecimo (that means he's tiny and somewhere around 2.5x3 inches) which means it's come together real quick! Just teasers for now since I'm making it as a gift for a friend, but the case is so lovely and I'm so thrilled to be back at it!
If you’d like to join us for Binderary, please join our Discord Server.
All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!
Here’s the list of who’s running the week 4 workshops:
Junk Drawer Bookbinding: @sayornispress
Renegade Round-Up 2025: @fanboundbooks, @robins-egg-bindery & @celestial-sphere-press
Shrink Ray Bindery: Customizing Book Nooks: @starblightbindery
Designing a Book in Affinity 3 (Beginner Encore): @kate2kat
Mini Bind Along: Altered Art Edition: @simply-sithel
i participated in the Renegade typesetting exchange this year, and my wonderful gifter gave me this awesome typeset of a Stranger Things Robin character study fic by @professorspork that i absolutely ADORE!!! so of course i had to bind it. notes under the cut!!
i had. some struggles with this book. and they were ENTIRELY SELF IMPOSED LMAOOOOO but i ended up with a book that i love anyway!
cover: the spine is homemmade bookcloth. wow, sky, you make bookcloth? no. i tried it Once (bought some cheap cotton quilting squares from joanns going out of business and also bought some fusible interfacing and did the process where you iron paper onto the cloth with the fusible web and it didn't go well) and now i have three sheets of kind of shitty bookcloth. BUT i didn't have other book cloth in a color that felt right and the stars echoed the title so well i had to try it. and honestly i think it turned out nice!!! the pink is hand-marbled paper that i got from someone else in Renegade. i was afraid it would clash with the star cloth but... idk i think it looks nice! and i also think, who cares if it clashes it's FUN. OH WAIT I FORGOT the other mistake i made is that when i was attaching the pink paper, i did the front and then went WAIT FUCK I FORGOT TO CUT THE BOOK BOARD DOWN TO THE RIGHT SIZE!!!! so i hastily did some impromptu book surgery to peel the paper off the boards just enough that i could trim it down to the right size and then reattached it, and honestly out of all the fuckups i had working on the book, this is the one i salvaged the best. you can't even see it now.
endbands: i sewed endbands. i have some embroidery floss that's like... ombre between light and dark of the same color, so i used an orange and a pink to echo the lesbian flag motif in the fic, but it turned out kind of messy looking? also this is bc my head and tail of my book block are a FUCKING MESS so that made it worse. this will come up again.
endpapers: once again: didn't have anything that was a color that matched well, so i went... this looks nice and is inocuous! (that's bc it's the back side of a paper with a pattern, which is also why the endpaper is attached to the first page of the textblock on both sides so you can't see the reverse side of the endpaper.)
title page: okay so the typeset has this beautiful full page color wash of the lesbian flag colors. i... don't have a printer that can do borderless printing. well i might but i can't get it work and am too scared to try again. you know what else i don't have? any way to effectively trim a text block. what that SHOULD Have meant is that i left it alone and just had a border on three sides of the title page and it would have looked FINE! but in my hubris and arrogance, i thought: what if i try trimming the block with an xacto knife, even tho it's massively fucked up every other book i've tried it on? ...so anyway it massively fucked the book, and i just went. okay. can i get the top edge clean enough that i don't hate it, even if it's slanted? yes? great i'm just Leaving It There. so anyway that's why the top doesn't have a border, and also part of why i took a pic of the bottom endband bc the top is both wonky AND at a noticable angle.
interior: wow look at the striking use of color in the design elements of this typeset! i had to run a full print head cleaning cycle in the middle of printing this book bc for the first half, my yellow ink just... didn't work........ which really messed with the color of this lovely design. anyway after a 24hr pause in printing, i reprinted the first section so the title page would look nice and just lived with half the book having weirdly off colors. this is the good part tho! and it looks great!
anyway i hope this doesn't come off as me being disappointed in the book - i'm fucking thrilled iwth it! i'm so excited to reread this fic this way and honestly i like how it turned out! i'm just trying to document my process, and also i think it's nice to hear about other bookbinders' issues in a way that's like... And Then It Was Fine, because i feel very strongly that no matter how many errors you made, if you have a book at the end, you succeeded!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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If you'd like to join us for Binderary, please join our Discord Server.
All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!
Here’s the list of who’s running the week 3 workshops:
Marbling: Controlling the Variables: @dcbrierton
Designing a Book in Affinity 3 (Advanced): @kate2kat
Cheater's Guide to Traditional Edge Gilding: rainchaser
Linocut Logos: @aetherseer
Are there any authors out there who have a fic of theirs they'd like bound, for free? I just wrapped up a presentation for Binderary (whew!) and want to get into the swing of it and bind as many books as possible for the rest of the month. So, I'm taking requests for authors' copy gifts—it'd be totally free except for shipping.
My goal is to hit 48 books bound by the end of the year, so looking to bind a ton this month and need fics to bind!
---
I'm looking for:
Fanfic authors
Who have never received a bound copy of one of their fics
Who are willing to pay for shipping (I'm US-based, it usually runs $5–$10 in to ship in the US or $20–$40 to ship outside the US)
The fic to be bound is less than 200,000 words long
I'm offering:
1 handbound copy of 1 fic per author
Simple, clean formatting + decoration of the book
No cost to you other than shipping
Aim to get books out by end-of-March (depending on # of interested authors)
Message me if you are an author who may be interested!
Happy to bind fics for authors I haven't read and even fandoms I'm not a part of!
If you'd like to join us for Binderary, please join our Discord Server.
All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!
Here’s the list of who’s running the week 2 workshops:
Endpages Revealed: An Undercover Exposé: @silentsunpress
Simple Scribus Typesetting (With Scripts!): @notwhelmedyet
Typesetting in One Click: Microsoft Word Macros 101: owl_winter
Hinge Maths (And Other Bookbinding Maths): queercus
Medieval Manuscripts: Past and Present: kwrites & @imaginariumpress
