#bookmaking

As booktober is coming to a close, we’re taking a moment to celebrate the creative art of fannish bookbinding!  Fannish bookbinding and bookmaking is a type of fancraft where fans aim to replicate books or create original books inspired from their canons or bind fanfic, and can also overlap with the creation of custom zines.

Fanbinding can be done through commercial services, such as Print on Demand companies, or can be done non-commercial by printing and binding the works by hand. This involves methods such as old-school spiral bindings, using desktop thermal binding machines, traditional hand-sewn bindings for hardcovers or pamphlets, or glueless bindings such as coptic or sewn board binding.

Though author feedback is positive for the most part, fannish bookbinding faces the criticism that some people might do it to make a monetary profit and there is also the controversy of copyright blanket permission and plagiarism to consider.

Are you interested in learning more about fannish bookbinding? Check out our Fanlore page!

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On Tuesday, we made books! Led by Preventive Conservation Librarian and book artist Jess Ortegon, a group of students and staff sewed a text block and folded a paper binding, based on the parchment binding of our favorite 15th century Italian herbal, LJS 419.

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Join us for a talk by Julia Miller about her experience describing and documenting the bindings on 100 Greek manuscripts held in the U-M Library's Special Collections Research Center. Julia will show us what “magnificent” can mean with regard to the binding and repair of some of our oldest books; her presentation will be accompanied by a display of seven exemplars from our collection of Greek manuscripts. The event takes place on Tuesday 9 June at 5:30 pm in the Special Collections Research Center on the sixth floor of the Hatcher Library. Refreshments will be provided.

Behold! Necrofloranomicon! What a title. A real typesetting challenge, a word that long is. All hail @leveragehunters for writing this beautiful story. Here it is on ao3 and if you are into podfics, the podfic by Tipsy Kitty is one of the ones I have on my phone to listen to in the middle of the night when I can't sleep and need to hear something soft and a little sad but hopeful. From the author notes, this fic is:

(A love story about flowers, trust, and magic and the choices we make about doing what's right.)

The story has many rich descriptions of flowers which gave me a Victorian vibe. The main flower in the typeset is daffodils, because they have a sweet little moment in the story.

I love going through historical typesetting for inspiration, especially Victorian books! I ended up picking choices themed by Italian typography. Starting with these bird letters drawn by Gabriele DeSanctis in the 1840s. I spent a lovely day sorting the some scans into individual images and also had to make a W and a J, because, dangit, Italian doesn't have those letters. Here is my bird alphabet file if you want to use them. (Heads up my graphic design skills are not...really..."skills" so if you are picky about such things my clumsy but enthusiastic efforts will likely cause you pain.)

But, aren't these birds fabulous?

Keeping with the Italian vibes, The main body font is Coelocanth which is based off Nicolas Jenson’s 15th-century Venetian letters. Cursive font is Taggette and Tagette Plus by www.pia-frauss.de based on Italian chancery cursive of the 16th and 17th century known as Cancellaresca. Pia Frauss is one of the coolest sources for beautiful and interesting and free fonts, fyi!

The font on the cover is EFCO Brookshire, which is based off of Victorian signage. The other images in the text are scans of Victorian designs that I got from various places to find free old pictures.

Taking pictures of books is a strange challenge. I always feel weird and yet I do like having pictures of finished projects.

Construction-wise, this is a "full cloth bradel" happy to chat about structural choices, but this is my current favorite because you can test the fit of the case to the text block through out all the stages of making it, so I no longer have issues with my boards being too larger, too small, or having crooked endpapers or poor spine alignment.

The fabric is home-made book cloth (I use fusible interfacing and archival quality tissue paper) of a Lizzy House design, by Andover if you're a fabric print nerd. The main print has unicorns, which I cut around, but you can see the little bunnies that made it in. Hi bun bun!

The cover design is Siser brand easy weed HTV.

I was really pleased with the final feeling of this book and spent a lot of time joyfully flipping through the pages before taking a video.

This was a fun romp for me. Special shout out to my 8 year old who shared my obsession with the bird letters and had baby's first graphic design experience in cleaning those up and making the missing letters. And then we spent a bunch of time research what letters/sounds are included in all different alphabets.

For my Staff Pick, I would love to show you Word for Word by Minneapolis book artist Jody Williams. This book was published under her imprint Flying Paper Press in a limited edition of 100 copies in 2001.  

Jody Williams (1956-2023) was a Minnesota-based book artist and teacher who focused on small artist books and collages. She taught at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and gave workshops across the US and Europe. Her books often concern temporality and space, and are universally precise.  

Our head of Special Collections often talks about the concept of play in relation to books and book artists. Word for Word is a wonderful embodiment of that concept.   

The book arts are as much concerned with form as with text, and this book combines the two into a tongue-in-cheek whole. With a Scrabble-like tile allowing the reader to pull out the rest of the book from its box, the game is incorporated from the very beginning. This book laughs at word play and sets the scene in a rigorous game of scrabble. Placing pictograph tiles alongside the more classic letter tiles, Williams plays with the game itself, pointing out the value of different words (or lack thereof).  

This book made me giggle when I first read it, and I hope it also brings some delight to your day!  

View more posts on Artists Books.

View more posts on books by Jody Williams.

View more Staff Picks.

I never expected to sell the entire first edition of my first full-length book of poetry, The Weeds Grow Anyway, within six months of releasing it. To say I am grateful would be an understatement. Thank you to everyone who made this book possible, who supported my efforts with resources, knowledge, and by ordering their own copy.

I am working on binding the second edition now. You can secure your own linocut-printed, hand-bound copy by preordering. The book is also available in an ebook format.