#bookbinding 404

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?)

Step 1: Researching

When I signed up for the exchange, I agreed that I was happy to bind fandom-blind. I'm always up for new discoveries! Since I love Wrong Number AUs, Call Me Beep Me seemed right up my alley, even without knowing the source material. It was a fun read, and it would probably have stayed as such if not for two things: 1. These characters send a lot of photos to each other 2. A lot of art was drawn for this story.

Behold: a rabbit hole!

It may be orphaned now, but Call Me, Beep Me remains the most kudosed VLD fic on AO3 even today. It is monumental to the fandom enough to even have a Fanlore page! As such, it's no surprise that the story has plenty of fanarts. Neither is it a surprise that, in the almost 10 years since the fanfic was posted, many contributing artists went missing from the net, deleted their works or their accounts.

People grow and change and don't especially want to be associated with some of their past works. Orphaned stories, deleted blogs: these are just your regular fandom heartbreaks.

It was still quite painful to realise that of the almost 50 links listed at the end of the work, more than half were broken or sent to deleted pages/accounts. I don't deal well with things disappearing when they were just there and their trace is still here, and I'm frankly awful at letting go: cue for a day-long research of the lost art! The Wayback machine came handy. The way Tumblr works also allowed to track down some of the deleted art. And, absolute plot twist, Pinterest (!), land of stolen art and dubious sources, actually helped with retracing the steps of some of the pieces. By the end of a somewhat-tiring day, my project folder was richer with almost 50 fanarts.

Except... things couldn't be too easy for this typeset. I knew it would be touchy, but I somehow still hung onto the hope that maybe I could chat with some of the artists. I couldn't. Which kind of sucked, because I needed their permission to include their art in the typeset that would be shared with the Renegade Bindery community.

I preciously kept the lost art, and scrapped my plans. Of all the photos the characters sent each other in the story, none would be the fanarts I'd exhumed. I still needed images, though, so I spent hours using my Shutterstock account to find generic photos that would work with the story. (I've never browsed so many cat photos in such a short time. It was nice.)

This was all good and well, but some of the photos in the story included the characters themselves, and, well. You obviously won't find them on Shutterstock. I had to rely on the next thing I could use without specific permission: screenshots. The great internet is fantastic for screenshots! But it doesn't cover everything. So I looked up for clips of the episodes, in order to make the screenshots by myself, according to the needs of the story.

And obviously... try watching out-of-context scenes for hours, with only the vague idea of the characters that formed in your mind while reading an AU. Guess what? I grew intrigued. Of course I did. So I went back to my beloved Internet Archive, that picked up where Netflix (shamefully) left off, and...

well

Long rabbit short, I watched Voltron: Legendary Defender. All 8 seasons.

I know, we are all very surprised it ended like this

We are still on my bindery blog so I won't go further in-depth about my experience of the show itself: in spite of the length and details I'm walking you through, I'm still describing parts of the whole process of fanbinding. Don't say you weren't warned: I did open this post by saying this was a weird project!

(Note: if you're really invested in what I thought of VLD, you can ask me at @lia404. Let's keep the fanmess where it should be; that is, on my main.)

And with all that, I was done with Step 1: the Researching part of the project. After a few weeks, I knew more about a fandom and its material, about how the AU met with canon, about what the characters look like, how they behave, and what sort of photos they would send.

I had all the knowledge I needed to hopefully make coherent visual choices. I had a folder filled with recovered art that wouldn't end in the typeset, and a folder filled with Shutterstock photos and screenshots that would be part of the typeset.

Time to move to...

Step 2: How To Typeset Your Textfic (worst choices only!)

It goes without saying, I had never typeset textfics before this one. If I had, I don't think I would have picked Call Me, Beep Me for the exchange :')

I already had a template of formatting for text messages, that I'd made for another typeset some time ago, and with it began the experimenting.

My main questions were: does it print well? Are the colours fitting? How busy does it look on the page? Would I read a full book like this?

Easy to answer: colour-wise, it printed rather well, it fitted the characters (since I knew them by then), and I'd probably have needed so much toner to print 85k words of this that I could already begin filing for bankruptcy.

My template was lovely for short, in story-messages. Not for a story almost entirely made of messages.

So I tried again:

Fewer colours seemed more reasonable. I liked the format, too; I had this idea of doing a weirdly sized book, slightly elongated as if it were a smartphone. After some more thinking, I had to accept that while it could work for a 15-to-20k story, 85k was way too long to fit the "fun-sized book" aesthetic.

I still needed to make it more simple, so I removed the phone lines.

I was almost there; actually, that was good enough for me for a start, even if some fine-tuning would be unavoidable.

Having decided of the shape of the typeset, I realised that since it was quite different from the original story, I would have to make other choices—and some that might impact the storytelling a little, so I had to do it intelligently.

On AO3, the author differenciates characters by changing the font between messages. They give the key at the beginning of each chapter:

Sadly, this doesn't translate really well on printed pages, and I already had my format in mind. The differenciation between characters would be through colours, and the formatting added an element: we would read directly from the characters' phones.

This is when I realised the impact it could have on the story. Choosing to show the messages through the phone of a character was basically choosing the point of view the conversation would be read from. This was not merely visual; it was storytelling. I had to ensure the choices were coherent.

A few examples:

When Keith messes up and accidentally sends a message to Shiro instead of Pidge, it felt important to keep the reader confused too. The formatting I'd planned for the typeset ruined the initial effect conveyed by the author's formatting on AO3, but I could still toy around with my own idea.

Instead of having Keith send the messages from his phone (which would immediately display the name of the character receiving the message, and thus ruin the effect of surprise of the recipient), I switched the point of view to Shiro then Pidge. This way, it's obvious that Keith is writing, but the recipient (from whose phone we're reading) is not as obvious just yet.

When Lance decides to give a stupid name to Keith in his contacts, or when he changes his contact photo, his phone needed to display it. And Lance has the occasion to do it a lot throughout the story.

These are obviously additions that were not part of the initial way the story was written, but that I couldn't avoid with the formatting I wanted to do. Might as well make them fun!

Receiving calls. While in Call Me, Beep Me, calls may be the only hint we have at whose point of view we're reading from, I still needed to find a way to display them in believable phone-way, and make them as impactful.

(I can't believe these screenshots just made me realise that there still are typesetting errors on page 292. I will never be free.)

Playing with timestamps. One of the things I really admire with Call Me, Beep Me is the author's consistency when it comes to using timestamps. In the whole 85k words of the story, I think I caught only 3 timestamp mistakes. All the timestamps are quite believable in the delay between each message, and while it's easy to disregard them when reading, it's super fun to notice the implications when you pay attention.

I thought that I'd put all the timestamps at the side of their respective messages, like the author does in the fic, but after pondering, I also decided to push the "messaging app" look by adding this date-and-time stamp that appears after a pause in the conversation. I didn't have a clear rule for that, but I opted to add these stamps for breaks in conversation that lasted more than 5-10 minutes. It may seem short, but these characters chat A LOT, and 5-10mn breaks in a conversation actually don't happen that often throughout the story.

Now that you've seen examples of AO3-to-typeset translation, let's rewind a little to the part where I was deciding how to do my formatting. Basically, the center point of it was that while the original story was written with vague point of views, my typeset needed "actual point of views" in the form of whose phone we were reading the story from. Which could only mean one thing.

I needed to do a first print and re-read the fic.

Colour-coded, of course, because what are we? Animals? The first colour is the phone we're reading from. The second colour is the person sending the messages to this phone. The name written in full letters with a pen is the display name on the phone.

Once this was done, I finally had everything I needed: a good idea of what my formatting would look like, all the images I needed to embed in the text, and the key elements to shape everything together with timestamps and point of view. Now, it was only a matter of putting everything together. Easy enough, right?

... ...right?

As Tumblr refuses that I put more than 30 images in a post, I'm going to take a break here before we move on to the next part of typesetting hell; the one that most people I talked with were interested in; my walking nightmare for weeks and weeks; the part where I actually started using Excel for a typeset, with a deadline on sight.

First, my mistake 100%: the typeset was meant to be A5, but I'm out of short grain A4 paper for A5 books (which is a tragedy I need to remedy QUICK), so I did an A6 book. The size of the font made it work, I was happy with it. For some reason, my printer skewed the print. It wouldn't have been such a big problem in A5, but it became visible in A6. Printer, why?! Then, I didn't stabilise my guillotine before cutting. Again, 100% my mistake. But my text block ended up cut even more askew. At this point, I was left with the painful question: DO I GO ON, DO IT START OVER, DO I GIVE UP?

I'm not a quitter. I have limited amounts of paper. I decided to go on.

After re-trimming, the text block straightened a little, and I figured having a straight book cover might help compensate. It did! Mostly.

Except. Since it was an AU centred on the fame of the Gavinners, I wanted a cover that would be glittery, flashy. I used a paper with lots, LOTS of glitter for endpages and I layered it on the cover with a cut-up bookcloth that shines a nice gold shifting into purple. It felt like the perfect fit, right?

Except: the paper was too thin, the glue sipped through, the bookcloth got stained. BADLY stained. I tried to salvage it by adding "grunge like" dots of gold.

This was NOT working. This was awful. I was so unhappy with it.

Still not a quitter, but I had other types of bookcloth. And most of all, I had a piece of fabric I'd been meaning to use for forever: shiny, thick, HOLO. (I have told you I love holo, right? Yeah, thought so.)

Scrap the cover, cut the endpages, tidy the text block, let's do it again.

(It's always a little painful)

I printed and glued new endpages. What I had NOT anticipated: the cloth I picked was heavier than I thought. Like, really heavy. And the end pages were too thin.

It tore.

Sunk cost fallacy at this point. I had a nice shiny cover, a perfectly decent text block. I wouldn't let endpages get me down.

I had some decorated paper, thicker than I usually use for endpages, but thought it might be the occasion. It took... a lot of glue. And possibly a bit of tape. I'm not 100% proud. BUT. It holds.

Finally, I managed to complete the bind with adhesive vynil cut with my Silhouette Cameo. And this, for once, worked exactly as intended.

The first one, from the summer 2024, back when I barely had any tool and clearly was missing experience:

Cheap bookcloth from Amazon, poorly printed text block (with the wrong grain direction), A5 format because I had no way to cut it efficiently to make an A6 format, and absolutely no knowledge on how to make a nice cover design. It was still a book, and I'm proud of the typeset.

For the second one, made in December 2024, I had bought a different bookcloth (a nice green suede from... Aliexpress, yes) and attempted something different for the cover. (I tried to carve the title into the boards. It didn't work. I also hid the

Still clumsy, but we were much closer to the final version: I was more confident in my cased binding, the design for the endpages was decided (I couldn't find endpapers that I liked so I ended up printing mine—it's a poem by an Arabic poet from 900), and I had settled for A6 rather than A5, so I had edited the typeset to make it work better. I ended pretty unhappy about the cover, though, with a title that still didn't satisfy me and small corners to hide the fact that mine weren't straight at all. (A problem that still plagues me, but it's a topic for another post.)

All these experiments led to the final version, the one from above:

Same binding technique, but at that point, I had discovered the incredible technique of laminated foil. That laminating machine I had bought on a whim almost 10 years ago? It's definitely working overtime now. The decorative paper I used took foil beautiful, and more surprisingly, so did the suede bookcloth, which allowed me to even put a title on the spine on 2 of the 3 copies.

It's still clumsy, and I still see its flaws. Believe me, there are many. But I won't tell: it was the completion of my first fanbind, and I'm so, so happy with the result.

I love Snake Charmer, it's one of my favourite Puzzleshipping stories. I am incredibly happy to be able to have this story on my personal shelf, now, and I even kept the prototypes: it's nice to remember the path I've walked :)

I began with a somewhat vague idea of the design. I decided to go with a purple & black colour scheme fitting for the Galra. I knew I wanted it to be not too thick, keeping this personal-notebook feel, but still thick enough to show the coptic stitches.

From there... everything else was pure FAFO.

I started by doing 6 single-sheet signatures, printed on an 90 gsm recycled paper that is slightly thicker than your usual 90gsm, and I lined the folds with black Colorado cloth tape from Ratchfords because, as mentioned above, I was going for glue-less. (This tape has saved me so much time and trouble I ended up buying 100m of it last time they had sales. I Do Not Regret A Thing, although, with this amount, I might be set for life now.) The recycled paper + Colorado cloth lining allowed to ensure getting just the thickness I wanted for the book, and keeping the spine an even black.

I had seen this fun pattern for coptic stitch who-knows-where ,and I knew it would be fitting. I have barely ever done coptic binds (maybe... three times?) so while I tried my best to measure and keep an even space between the holes on the cover, I winged basically everything else. Including the thread. The only purple thread I had was cheap cotton embroidery thread. And it turns out it is a pain to sew with. Keeping a good tension in the thread was a nightmare. I whined so much about it that, the next day, a friend went and bought me thick linen threads in different colours so she doesn't have to hear about it ever again. It's really cool linen thread too. So now I want to do more coptic binds.

With the spine a nice black, it would have felt strange to have the edges keeping their natural greyish colour. After considering my options, I thought "OH WELL" and picked up a black marker to line the edges by hand. Exactly the kind of things I used to do with my notebooks when I was an angsty teenager. Honestly, it couldn't have been more fitting.

The endpapers, taped on the boards using my trusted double-sided adhesive Gudy (because no glue, remember?) are made with regular 90gsm purple paper, on which I printed the first words of the Guide. I used the Galra alphabet made by user Salty_Sapphic on Reddit, that I have turned into a personal font specifically for this occasion. (I might re-use it in other Voltron binds in the future, though.) That means there will likely be other Voltron binds in the future, yes.

The boards for the cover are simple black 230gsm recycled cardboard. I really dig the texture of recycled paper for scrapbook projects. It's VERY satisfying. Keeping it simply black felt a little sad, though, so I dug through my Hoard Of Stuff-For-Covering.

I found sheets of holo stickers with scale-like patterns that I had bought for 0.5€ in a random clearance sale a year ago or so. I know Galras have fur, not scales, but consider: 1. it's holo and creates a fun balance with the black 2. it's holo and gives this weird otherworldly effect that I was going for, because even if it's a scrapbook, it's a scrapbook in space. Considering they're all using tablets and I'm not sure I've ever seen any pick up a pen, I wonder if Keith would have scrapbooked on his tablet. I love digital scrapbooking. I kind of see him do something like this. 3. it's holo and great to create the uncanny impression that the cover is glitching/corroding. 4. have I mentioned it's HOLO

IT'S SO SHINY AND I'M VERY WEAK, OKAY?

Anyway! I cut patches in the sheet (you can see them missing in the video above) to stick on the cover, so that the notebook looks like it's corrupted, with alien stuff covering its regular appearance—just like Keith feels like his body gets corrupted with his genes, I guess.

Once everything was put together, I still felt like something was missing. I wondered if I should maybe do a label with Keith's name on it, like these old notebook labels they give you at school to write your name on. As usual when I'm unsure about something design-related, I went to pester my partner about it. While they never fail to grumble about how "they're more design-challenged than me and why am I asking them", they usually have very good advice. This time again, they did not disappoint. "Why would you use a label? Keith is absolutely the kind of guy who wouldn't bother with it and just scratch his name on the cover."

And. Yeah. Okay. Point. Keith definitely picked up a red pen and scribbled his name on the cover without a care. Since Soda has designed the Guide so that Keith signs at the end, I decided to do my best and try to freehand the same writing style, for consistency. It's... not perfect, but I like the result. (Also. It's metallic red. ALL THE SHINY!!!)

And... that's it! First time binding something this short, first time doing this type of coptic, first time creating a font... This bind is the sum of many happy FAFO accidents that, put together, end up becoming one of my fave things I've done since I picked up bookbinding.

A massive THANK YOU to @soadscrawl for creating this inspiring guide and giving me the permission to share.

I'll just conclude with the thing that convinced me I just needed to bind it:

Intradiegetically, Keith is the author of this guide. He is the one writing this whole mess of self-deprecating unhelpful "advice". And yet, as if it weren't enough, he manages to add a layer of self-deprecation by adding "sorry" by hand afterwards. Like he re-read what he wrote and managed to feel even worse and make it worse. This broke my heart so efficiently; even before reaching the tear-stained page.