#book collection

A little typesetting was required but not much: adding page numbers, since ebooks don't have them; turning the 4 novellas of Cold Steel and Secrets into only one volume; and, since The Falcon and the Wolf had only been published on a website, I took 2 hours to make a decent typeset of it.

The printing was a little tedious (so many pages, and my printer is slow), folding went well BUT I made a terrible mistake when pressing the signature a first time. I split the signatures into different piles, to balance them well in the press. I just forgot that, since the title of the book was not written at the top of the text blocks, I had no way to ensure which signature went to which book.

OOPS.

A bit of reading was required to ensure I was not frankensteining these poor books, but things got sorted without too much pain.

Is there anything more satisfying to look at than nicely sewn, freshly-trimmed, ready-to-round text blocks? I think not.

My friend was incredibly nice with the material he provided and I got to work with beautiful, beautiful marbled paper from Shepherds London.

My photo sucks, but I swear these papers were amazing to work with.

Printing the covers was not as smooth as I would have liked. I had to design the back cover (using either the description of the ebook on the official website, or an abstract chosen arbitrarily) and printed everything with a laser printer. It's deemed to age poorly, as laser-printed covers tend to fade, but... Well, that was part of the deal.

As usual, the pain came with the glueing part, and it's only a me-problem (and possibly an ADHD problem), since I found myself having to VERY QUICKLY unglue-reglue 3 books that I had just cased upside down. Three out of seven is not so bad, honestly. And there was barely any damage (I just had to repair one spine with colorado bookcloth tape. Just one!) My friend didn't even notice.

One day I'll learn to PAY ATTENTION when casing and I'll NEVER case upside down again.

The last ordeal left was to take somewhat-not-awful photos of the end result (which are the photos at the top of this post, so. I still have a long way to go.)

Then came the nice and fun and satisfying of the books, to be shipped to my friend.

Overall, I'd say it was a great learning experience and a good opportunity to work on something a little different. I will likely never work on seven books AT THE SAME TIME, though. It was a little too much for my poor heart.

(And I will never stop resenting publishing houses who go digital-only except their files are so, so, so badly generated. Why are fanmade typesets better than the official ones, so many times?)