#bookbinding fic

At long last! The bookbinders chapter. I've really struggled with this one, not because of the content (which is utterly fascinating, thanks to all of my interviewees) but because I am severely over the word limit and I've had to be judicious with what to include, despite the swaths of information I've learned via our interviews. 

This is a hefty chapter, split into five(!) parts:

le introduction

fic bookbinders' motivation for binding fic

how this work fits into the fandom communication circuit, 

how this fannish practice upends commercially-focused notions of book production, and 

how these workds reveal the challenges of material preservation

Introduction

This final chapter looks at bookbinding fic as a fannish response, an increasingly popular phenomenon that follows in the footsteps of 20th-century fanzines. Like fic writing, fic binding is mostly an amateur endeavor in that its practitioners craft for love, not financial compensation. Save for one binder with a Masters in Book Arts, all of the binders I interviewed for this chapter are self-taught. A few began bookbinding by placing printed copies in three-ring binders or printing at a copy shop; others took a class and pursued their interest through online resources. Some bookbinders have been binding for a few years; many took advantage of increased free time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fans who bookbind fanfiction exemplify Leslie Howsam’s assertion that ‘books happen; they happen to people who read, reproduce, disseminate, and compose them; and they happen to be significant’ [1]. For bookbinders, the adaptation of the fic text into physical printed books follows a trend in the digital age to make physical art objects to counter obsolescence, data loss, and provide a break from the screen. Their work exemplifies Leah Price’s refutation of the ‘death of reading’ narrative and Jessica Pressman’s examination of the aestheticizing attitudes surrounding books [2]. By transforming fic and putting it into material form, bookbinders demonstrate how books document changes in readership and why they are worth studying.

Fic has been understudied by book historians because it’s digital, non-commercial, and non-profit, and fic bookbinders create homemade books that complicate book production models reliant on the ‘follow the money’ principle. By practicing in the private space of affective labor, fic bookbinders construe value for fic with their personal investment in the work (both the fic text itself and the process of binding) and their intent to return gifts to the fic writer [3]. They connote book production as not-for-profit and privately consumed, not necessarily driven by profit. The rejection of commercialization of fic is strong among the bookbinders that I interviewed, and most were hesitant to solicit commissions for a variety of reasons, ranging from expertise to unapproachable costs. The formal and subversive constraints of fanfiction have kept it apart from the traditional for-profit publishing communication circuit and traditional modes of text distribution; bound fic, rather than align the text with book publishing simply because of its codex form, further distances fic from that traditional circuit as it assigns the codex with new meanings of production and value.

This chapter explores the motivations behind bookbinders, how their fannish work upends commercially-focused notions of book production, and how this work fits into the fandom communication circuit. These works reveal the challenges of material preservation, as the printed form of fic holds different information and provides a different reading experience than the digital form. In the fandom communication circuit, binding fic is creative fannish response with aesthetic and craft elements, as many binders look to design the books in relation to their content. Binders often circulate a copy back to the writer, perpetuating fandom’s gift-giving economy and community function. This reciprocation reinforces the node between reader response and writer function and sits in the response zone of the community model (images at link).

Citations 

Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture, p.5.

Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), forthcoming.

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 3 covers how fic binding completes the communication circuit via fan reciprocation 

Part 4 covers how fic binding challenges traditional publishing norms 

The Redundancy of Preservation

Anthony Grafton writes that to understand books, we must interview them in their environment, so to understand bound fic, book historians must attend to two fannish environments: the unstable digital distributing platforms from which fic came, and the material preservation form born in fannish response [1]. The history of fandom media illustrates the instability of digital media in myriad ways: links break, sites crash, URLs expire. Many of the binders have experienced fic loss—returning to bookmarked fic only to find it had disappeared, deleted without any indication of what it may have been—but few said that it wholly or significantly influences their desire to bind fic. In response to the question, ‘Who or what do you trust to build a reliable archive of fic, if anyone?’ the binders unanimously cited AO3, but with trepidation. One binder wrote ‘I do not have unshakeable faith that they will be able to remain successfully funded for the foreseeable future or that laws won't be passed that lead to the site being shut down. The key to survival is redundancy, both digital and offline’. Another echoed, ‘the entire internet is ephemeral, and I have had too many technical snafus to put my entire trust into digital format’. And a third: ‘I’m going through my bookmarks and archiving them to the Internet Archive so they are protected against author removal’. The binders share a general wariness towards relying on digital forms, and while preserving fic is not the only or driving reason for binding fic, it is on the list. Preserving works in print also communicates their legitimacy, especially that of queer works, which historically have been condemned or outright destroyed. Bound fic counters the pitfalls of digital sites, where fan work may be lost without warning, but lacks the real-time feedback in comments and kudos and the links to additional fan works, although those still exist online. Bound fic also counters fallacies of traditional publishing, which tends to ignore fan works. As I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 3, although works like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies emerge from commercial publishing houses, I reiterate that they are not fanfiction precisely because they were not written in nor attend to a fannish context in the way that bound fic does [2].

The binders change the text in preparing it from digital for print form. All of the binders cut comments and many exclude or rearrange any combination of summaries, author notes, and disclaimers, and kudos and hits statistics. One lacks sentimentality around these excisions: binding fic ‘is less of an archive project than a pleasure project’, so the concern for preservation pales to readability. Binders range in their approach to formatting metadata: two binders include metadata (author, title, tags, archive warnings, etc.) as a ‘copyright page’, with content warnings and research notes as appendices. Another includes summaries and tags because to make ‘these books to feel like a true physical version of what’s there on the web’. One binder of 104 fics has modified their typesetting process to expedite the time from screen to print in attempts to bind as many fics as quickly as possible:

Nowadays I drop everything in and go, for two reasons. I try to do a lot of fics and [editing out Author Notes] is a huge time suck. But these notes are also significant as part of the metatext. In the future these will be of interest to any scholar studying early years of online fandom and just contributes to these books being a time capsule of a phenomenon that is very specific to our time and place.

By favoring production speeds over editing, this binder prioritizes print preservation (and documents a book’s environment for a future book historian); ten binders move metadata and extratextual information to appendices or smaller, side bindings to avoid interrupting reading flow without eliminating the information. Although the lack of text editing seemingly counters the attention to craft, the binders distinguished between the craft of the book—its binding, endpapers, and internal ornamentation—from the content of the text itself. Formatting a text can be the most time-consuming task, so reducing that process expedites the production of a volume significantly.

A few themes emerge regarding losses in transforming fic to print form, including accessibility, interactivity, and malleability. Only people with copies of the fic can read those copies, although the fic remains online for the time being. The loss of hyperlinks and comments strips the fic of its community context. Printed versions inhibit the writer’s ability to edit and update the fic, and one binder noted that ficbinding’s greatest strength and weakness is that it makes fic ‘a fossil of a fixed point in time…It leaves no room to adapt’. But the gain is a hard copy and a sense of long-term preservation independent of online activity: ‘As long as Modern English can be read and the book remains undamaged by water, fire or other problematic time-passing problems, it is here and real’. This kind of preservation aligns with a history of recovering lost works via their textual commentaries; were every copy of Harry Potter to be lost and the internet wiped, one could reconstruct the events of the series via bound copies of Annerb’s ‘The Changeling’ and dirgewithoutmusic’s ‘boy with a scar’ series. Similarly, where the digitally-linked community disappears, it is reforged through sharing the copy with the author, who ‘gets to see how a reader put different materials together to best represent their work’. One binder wrote, ‘I think this is a case of having your cake and eating it too: the electronic copy is still there for the wider audience to read, the text is set in a permanent form which has its own artistic value’. The gains of permanence, the opportunity to create a physical object, and the ability to thank the writer for their work through bound fic outweigh the instantaneous losses of accessibility and digital interactivity.

One of my final questions to the binders concerned the long-term preservation of their library: where will their bound works go if they can no longer take care of them or die? One binder was in discussion with the University of Iowa special collections, which is home to a notable fanzines collection. Four posed sending the volumes to fandom friends, two want to bequeath them to family, and two have explicitly stated their wishes in their wills. One added that he firstly trusts fans to appreciate fan-printed books as both ‘stories worth reading’ and as art objects, rather than non-fans who do not understand the connotations of the works. Binding fic is a momentary win in the long-term battle against information loss, and these personal libraries prolong the question of how and where these works will survive. One binder articulated the long-term value of these volumes: ‘I think that people making fine binding versions of fic absolutely validates this place in libraries, and I have no doubt that some of the books made by the fic binding community will make their way into the special collection libraries or museums and other institutions’. Ensuring that preservation will most likely be a self-undertaken project, in the way that all things fandom are.

Citations

Anthony Grafton, ‘Codex in crisis: the book dematerializes’, in Worlds made by words: scholarship and community in the modern West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.311.

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders.

Part 3 covers how bookbinding fic completes the fanfiction communication circuit

Part 4 covers how ficbinding challenges traditional publishing norms 

Part 5 covers how ficbinding reveals the tensions of material preservation

Methodology

The primary evidence for this chapter consists of interviews conducted with twelve bookbinders via Discord, a chat communication app. There was a preexisting community of bookbinders on Discord who use the app to share resources, techniques, and their completed projects. I coordinated with the founder of the server, @armoredsuperheavy​, to introduce my dissertation topic and the opportunity to participate in interview questions. Participation was opt-in, and participants read an information sheet about the project and signed a consent form before being given access to a locked channel on the server.

Questions were posted in the locked channel over the course of two weeks; most interviewees responded directly in the thread to aggregate and reference one another’s responses. I followed up via private chat with four participants who preferred to answer all of the questions via Word document, and in one case, in an audio-only interview conducted over Discord.

In line with fan studies methodology, which prioritizes transparency and participation, all participants reviewed two drafts of this chapter to clarify the meaning of their statements, and they will all receive a copy of this dissertation. I refer to the binders anonymously (i.e. ‘one binder’, ‘another binder’) to respect their privacy.

Motivation: Bookbinding as Fannish Response

Bookbinders bind fic for many reasons: they want a print object to reduce screen time and to carry around; they want to gift book objects to fic authors; they enjoy the challenge and craft of putting a book together. One binder wrote that her major motivation is her ‘love of some fics that I read REPEATEDLY (too late at night when I should be sleeping and I can't set my phone down), but I do miss having something physical to hold’. The urge to have a material version of favorite fic is a theme. Another binder wrote, ‘I really like the idea that I can give fics to the author to help them know that others enjoy their fic and hopefully really cement their love of sharing that fic with others’. By reciprocating a gift to the author, there is explicit encouragement to continue sharing their work, completing the communication circuit (Figure 1). Many binders consider bookbinding an alternative form of fannish response, allowing them to reciprocate a gift to the author who gave them their favorite fic. Intentional preservation falls lower on the list for most binders, but is the primary motivator for one binder.

Figure 1 I.D.: Model labled ‘Fanfiction Communication Circuit’. Two circuits, connected by arrows. The right hand circuit begins with ‘author’, points to ‘publisher’, points to ‘distributor’, points to ‘reader’. The center of the circuit reads ‘circulates text’. The left hand circuit begins with ‘fic writer’, points to ‘distributing platform’, points to ‘reader’, points to ‘fannish response’, which has a red circle around it. The center of the circuit reads ‘circulates text/creative products’. The two circuits connect at ‘reader’. End I.D.

Hard copies of fic appeal for numerous reasons, including beauty, a sense of accomplishment, and the challenge of book-making. One binder wrote, ‘it’s quite fun to hold something both beautiful and entertaining’. Another concurred that ‘the appeal lies mainly in the process of making the book, honestly’. A third added, ‘It’s about the Fwoomp when you put it down. No, in all seriousness: I like my hard copies because I like making them, more than I like having them. I like the challenge, I like learning about formatting and design while I do it’ [1]. The satisfaction of making a book is as appealing as having the object itself, and practicing a self-taught craft in leisure time aligns with the non-professional precedent of fandom.

Binding fic is also a form of reader response. Most of the binders read the fic before they bind it; only two bind fic based on recommendations from trusted friends or before they finish reading it themselves, trusting their friends’ intuition. All the binders select fic to bind based on what works they keep returning to. Some choose based on criteria such as certain themes, like queer kink or transgender identity or struggles, or established tropes, such as ‘enemies-to-lovers’. The binders also consider the fic’s length to see if it is an appropriate size for a book, sometimes combining shorter stories into an anthology to give the book a proper heft.

In preparing the text, binders spend considerable time typesetting, cleaning up the remnants of HTML, and selecting typefaces and ornaments to complement the story. Each binder prefer different elements of the process: one noted that the covers and endpapers are most important to her in communicating the book’s aesthetics. Another echoed that the binding can reflect the contents of the book: ‘I’m ordering bookcloth in red/yellow/green/blue for a series of Hogwarts fic in which the founders have their own story’ to match the color themes of the four school Houses. A third described this design process as ‘incorporat(ing) some elements of the visual identity of the universe in which the fic takes place’ in the book’s construction and presentation, like matching the binding to characters’ signature colors. One binder painstakingly chooses ornaments and typefaces ‘based on the time period, for historical fiction, or to compliment themes in the book’. Another attends to the aesthetic of published works in the genre; for his Lord of the Rings fic, he cross-referenced four different publishers and learned the ‘rules of Tolkein’s legendarium’ to match the book with its the fictional universe. The incorporation of story elements into the visual expression of the fic demonstrate that the binders are not simply creating a product but thinking critically about the work as a reader.

Citations

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 3 covers how ficbinding completes the fanfiction circuit via reciprocation

Part 5 covers how ficbinding reveals the tensions of material preservation

Complication: Bookbinding Fic v. Traditional Publishing

While producing these books is resource-heavy, bookbinders challenge the notion that only the worthiest information merits the cost of book production and that only traditional publishing methods can establish a work’s worth [1]. One binder has stated on their Tumblr and in interviews that they seek to bind works that would never be published by traditional publishing houses [2]. Bookbinders undertake this expensive hobby because they enjoy it and it is meaningful to them, attending to the ‘felt life’ of reading over commercial motivation. Their not-for-profit, private practice inverses the public circulation, for-profit model of book production that dominates the narrative of book publishing.

There are a few stages to a bookbinding project, and the range of time spent on any stage differs per binder. In general, formatting a fic in a desktop publishing program (Word, InDesign, or Affinity Publisher, the three most popular programs) takes anywhere between 2-12 hours, or 4 hours for a 150- to 200-page work. Folding, sewing, gluing, and casing takes 3-5 hours; producing one book can take anywhere from 8 to 20 hours. Some binders group tasks, such as cutting down papers or bookcloths. The amount of time spent per day also varies; as this is a hobby, some dedicate a few days per week and most work in 3- or 4-hour bursts. Besides one binder who prints using Lulu, an on-demand self-publishing service, and one who prints at Staples, all the binders print the works at home. The lack of outsourcing aspects of production emphasizes the binders’ dedication to the autodidactic craft.

Bookbinding is an expensive hobby. In response to the question ‘what would you guess is the unit cost of a volume?’, the binders lamented their expenses (‘That’s such a painful question. If I figure it out, I might cry’). One binder wrote that the material costs of a small, 100-page book printed using inexpensive papers are about $12.50. In contrast, ‘For a large 500-page book I make two copies of, use premium text paper for the block and hand-marbled papers on the case, then ship one to Europe, the cost of materials and shipping is $104.00’. Another binder calculated his labor costs, writing ‘if I'm also investing at least US$96 of my own time for each individual volume (considering myself a novice and assuming my office's starting salary of $16/h), then each volume still can be called about $112. Holy shit!’ One binder wrote that she is ‘very focused on the cost of supplies’ and often recycles materials, like thrifting a leather skirt for covers, waxing her own cotton thread, and using package cardboard for boards, making her biggest cost printing at Staples. The combined cost with no monetary return signals that these binders bind fic because the works have value as art and objects, not simply as profitable entities.

In the literary marketplace, this kind of self-publishing is often devalued because it is for pleasure, without a known locale of production, and is separate from the institutions of publishing [3]. The value of a book is not only tied to its circulation and profit, but who is circulating and profiting from that work [4]. Bookbinding fic challenges this marginalization by suggesting that the value of a work is tied to the personal relationship with that work, the effort expended putting it into a new form, and sharing it with the author.

Despite these costs, the majority of binders are disinterested in or uncomfortable with commissions, a hesitance partially related to fandom’s gift-giving ethic. Six binders noted that they have known the history of gift-giving in fandom or understood it implicitly and five binders absorbed this knowledge through fandom spaces or ArmoredSuperHeavy’s Tumblr. Two binders specifically noted that they want to preserve ‘rare and precious phenomenon’ of the fandom gift economy, especially as younger fans seek to capitalize off their work—older fans are indeed more committed to fic as not-for-profit and fandom as an amateur enterprise [5]. For four of the binders, bookbinding is the first or an additional way they have participated in fandom gift culture, alongside fic exchanges and fanart.

To argue that the binders avoid for-profit production exclusively because of fandom’s gift-giving ethos would be disingenuous. Rather, accepting and pricing commissions is tricky for a fleet of reasons: one binder found that taking commissions ‘chang(ed) the dynamic between me and the author and the commissioner—they were customers now, I had a deadline’. Setting a fair wage pushes the volume price to $275-$350, or even higher. All of the bookbinders are aware of the value of their labor; they noted that a fair wage would price one of their books well out of reach for an average buyer. Regardless, none of them actively bind fic for the financial incentive, rather for artistic and altruistic reasons. Three binders noted that they are still beginners and would not feel comfortable selling a project without more experience. Four binders wrote that they would accept binding commissions that covered the cost of materials, but did not want to bind fic to avoid profiting off of other’s work. Only one binder wrote that they would do commissions and noted that the price tag is high: ‘a full leather hand-bound [book] would retail for about $600. Most artist books retail around $200-$300. I’d probably ask for similar amounts to the artist books, around $150-$200’. As such, the hesitation around commissions is not necessarily an adherence to fandom’s gift-giving ethos (although that is present), rather it is a confluence of hesitations of working-for-pay, fair wages, and not exploiting other’s work. The attitudes towards commissions, persistence in this costly hobby, and valuation of work alter the meaning of book production.

Citations

David Reinking, Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-Typographic World’, in A History of the Book in America: Volume 5: Enduring the Book, p.491.

Conjoined, ‘Episode 15: I’m a bloodhound for the gay stuff’, Interview with ArmoredSuperHeavy, 1 Feb 2020 [Accessed 29 September 2020].

Coker, ‘The margins of print?’, 2.6. Fanfiction is a women-dominant space, and many of women’s acceptable leisure activities are tied to utility rather than leisure. Fic writers are thus doubly marginalized for not capitalizing on their hobby when that opportunity exists and because their time is socially constrained by expectations of productivity.

Cupidsbow, ‘Women/Writing 1: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor’, livejournal, 26 April, 2007, [Accessed 29 September 2020]; Coker, 2.6.

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 4 covers how ficbinding challenges traditional publishing norms 

Part 5 covers how ficbinding reveals the tensions of material preservation

Reciprocation: Completing the Communication Circuit

While only two bookbinders began binding fic specifically to gift copies to authors, many more have adopted the practice or plan to send copies of fic once they complete their volumes. Six of the twelve binders noted that they have or are in the process of sending fic to authors, while three others noted that they would like to do so but have not or cannot due to logistical or financial constraints. Gifting bound fic to the author is ‘the best part of the whole thing’, for one bookbinder. Another echoes, ‘I think it’s very important to show appreciation to the people who make the stories that we’re binding at all…the effort of binding an entire book has to be the strongest demonstration of “I loved your story this much!” there is’. As this binder illustrates, the bookbinders reciprocate the effort of fic writing with the labor-intensive process of constructing a new material form for that fic and returning it to the author. This action circulates creative products back to the author, completing the communication circuit. Likewise, positive author response to these gifts (mini-photo shoots, personalized thank-you notes) signal how gifts affirm authors and solidifies the exchange of creative products through the circuit.

Last weekend I studied @ArmoredSuperHeavy advice on book formating. Since then, I'd been drafting out ideas for starting a fanfic book collection.

On Saturday I will go to a Bradel binding workshop. I'm very excited, it's my first step to start binding fanfiction.

My first project will be a small but symbolic fic. My older friends from the HG/SS ship would recognize the name: Letter from the Exile one merciful morning by TextualSphinx. It's one of the first fics written for this pairing, back in 2000. I want to start with it for the same reason. Not only was it a milestone in my fandom, but it takes me back to what I was reading 18 years ago. It reminds me of people who are gone, as well as my own involvement in the good old ship.

I doubt I will be able to find TextualSphinix, the last story was published in 2003. Does anyone know how to locate them?