#fandom binding

The @renegadepublishing Bound Book Exchange is complete and the books I made have been received.

I was very lucky in that my recipient, @rhipidurafan, had multiple amazing picks for fics she'd like to receive and two spoke to me immediately. I got even more lucky when both @neverwaswise and @shinyopals gave me permission to bind their fics for this exchange.

I got less lucky when my Cameo 4 decided it wasn't going to foil my titles and tentacles for me, but I think it came out Not Too Bad doing it by hand.

Ship In A Bottle by Neverwaswise (rated T) is a modern AU for OFMD and it starts with Stede moving into a lighthouse and doing some interior decorating. This decorating scheme influenced my choices for the case where I tried to match the paper to the wallpaper he was installing and the bookcloth and endbands to the orange brick of the interior of the lighthouse. I also knew early on that I wanted to reference the kraken tentacles on the case or end papers, but I couldn't find anything that felt right, so drawing my own tentacles it was. I'm so happy that the two that ended up making a kind of heart shape wrapped around to be on the front of the book.

The Magnus Institute vs the 21st Century by Shinyopals (rated T) is a series of four epistolary fics (well, 3 epistolary fics and one scriptbook style fic). I discovered very early that there is a very disappointing lack of good eye imagery for decorative paper and cloth options. I decided to lean heavily into the fact that the Magnus Institute may be dragged into the 21st century against their wills, but that doesn't mean they won't still keep things as old school as possible. For the emails and IMs, I tried to replicate the fonts that would be used in Outlook and on the cellphones, and then I matched fonts for the scriptbook as well.

But for the titles, I picked out a nice crunchy Punk Typewriter font. My Cameo 4 tried its best to destroy that on the spine, twice getting caught in one space and ruining it. And foiling by hand made it a little extra crunchy but I kind of enjoy the effect that happened. Yes, technically it's not perfect. But by this point I'd already decided on making my own cover paper art as a manila folder with post notes on it, so I actually enjoy the way that the imperfections in the spine titling make it look even more like this book is the result of the archival assistants printing off all the emails and IMs to file hard copies and then needing to hand adjust when the typewriter didn't quite label perfectly.

I also had a lot of fun coming up with some of the things to have on the post notes on the back cover.

And what would a TMA series be without some tea? I made the little tea bookmark and realized I didn't have any particularly tea colored size 10 crochet thread, so I did the reasonable thing and used gold with metallic and it's fancy tea. That's my story.

That means deciding what size you want to print at (because that determines how many lines will fit on a page), formatting the title page, adding the front matter information about where and when it was published, setting up headers or footers for page numbers and the title and author, all that stuff that makes it look like a Real Book TM.

Oh hey, I’ve already had to pick a font for my title, the author name, the front piece, decide on formatting for that. And I made the art for the title page there too.

Picking fonts and sizes for my body text, chapter headings, and deciding if I want to use a drop cap.

This fic was pretty straight forward. Not a lot of texts to format. No poems.  Those are both things that have come up in some of my other typesetting.

But I did need to decide if I was going to use book ornaments, and if so, which ones?

In the end, I decided to do the only choice that felt right for this fic. Make my own. This is a fic about hiking the Appalachian Trail! Scrolls and Flourishes are pretty, but not really the right vibe.

What is the right vibe? I’m glad you asked.

Making a divider line of boot prints, adding a trail marker stamp at the end of chapters, and chapter ornaments based on the trail signs.

Currently, this piece is still all in different colors for each different style I’m using for fonts. It allows me to check which style looks like what easily and make changes to large amounts of text by changing the style. Before printing, I would change the font color to black.

But I’m not ready to print yet.

For a couple of reasons.

I have a couple of pages of blank space, which I could just leave at the back of the book, no problem. Or I could draw something else to go with the fic and fill it out. I have to decide which I want to do.