#fic binding

First off, I have to say that I absolutely love this fic, I definitely recommend it, and also it is twice the wordcount of the first Harry Potter book, which makes rereads an endeavor. Solution? Bookbinding!!

I found this little old photo album that wasn't being used -- super lovely, leather bound (though idk if the leather is real) and just about the perfect size for nearly 800 pages of fluff and angst and family feels :D

On the front and back inside of the cover, I drew these fun living-color swirls, and it might not look professional but also fight me bc it was fun and painstaking to do :)

Here we have the inside title page & author, the dedication (in italics bc I'm pretty sure that's what they do) and a table of contents which actually spans 4 pages but I figured you get the idea with just the first bit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We have some excerpts, plus the beginning of the author's note at the end, which was beautiful, I have to say. It might be visible in one of the in the photos, though I used white thread, but I did print them in 16-page signatures, then fold them, and sew each one together -- there were so many ToT

Dunno how visible it is, but in the one photo I think you can see that the long edges of the pages are kinda curved, because with the changing font size (I ended up at 10.5 Times New Roman) and page size, I could barely fit it into the spine, and I had to put several books on the stack of papers before I glued the felt spine on (which had flaps that I then glued to the actual cover for flexibility), so some of them are pushed up on the edges. A little annoying, but I made it work, so it's all good ^^

Now it's on my shelf with all my other favorite books! I hope y'all appreciate that it's been placed with A Death In the Family and some other Batman stuff. Also, I collected tiny Jesuses and made them into a rainbow :D (there's no purple or pink but if I somehow get more in the future I'll prob sharpie a couple of their sashes to complete it)

The first book was a collection of all of Rose's Marvel poems, which was super cool and unique to work on! Usually this wordcount (~12k) would be an A7 size book, but... since it's poetry and I wanted each poem to effectively be its own chapter (eg starting on the right page even if the left is blank) as well as for as many as possible to be on a single page rather than split across couple, this ended up as a 167-page A5 book!

I also indented the text twice as much as I do for a prose block, since the lines mostly didn't take up the full width of the page and I didn't want the shorter ones to get buried in the crease

The title pages in Gabriola, the table of contents page is in Garamond, and the textblock is in Gabriola and Noto Serif Hebrew. For this book I did the typesetting for the textblock in Libre Office Writer and for the front matter in Affinity Publisher.

The second book I made was of Safe and (the) Sound by @27dragons and @tisfan:

This story is mostly set in a beachside town, so I used nautical drawings by Ramona/alderdoodle for the interior design elements.

The title font is Marline Staylish, the chapter headings are Ink Free, and the textblock font is primarily Carlito. This book was entirely typeset in Affinity Publisher.

(Spoilers for the fic if you zoom in on the interior shots!)

I am a sucker for presumed dead fics, but I am also soooooo picky about them. When I read It's All Canadian Vodka's Fault by @fripiewrites I fell in love immediately. It's the perfect balance of angst, a realistic scenario, and comfort at the end. And, bonus, it has a bunch of multi-media elements! As soon as I finished I knew I wanted to bind the fic. It's a short enough fic that I wasn't sure I could make a hardcover work, but I did! The only thing I had to do different was use string for a bookmark instead of a ribbon.

For the interior, I spent a lot of time creating different looks for all those multi-media elements, and I learned a lot of stuff about InDesign I'd never done before, so that was super neat. Some parts were really tricky, like the Tweets, to keep them formatted right and not breaking weird between pages. But I got it done! (I about murdered my printer when printing it out, though. It kept fucking up. Printers are the devil.)

I also found a neat font that had a sort of jersey-ish feel to it for that title page. For the scene dividers I used some bottle symbols from a symbol font. For the page numbers, I used some sort of blob shaped symbols around the numbers, with different ones on the left vs. right pages.

For the endpapers, I chose this matte black that has a raised chevron pattern because it made me think of tire treads a bit, and then I used my Cricut to cut out vodka bottles with the Canadian maple leaf. Then I glued this nice blue with a subtle icy pattern to the back to create a solid endpaper. The front and back papers each have different vodka spills around them to add a little extra visual interest.

Then for the covers I picked a shiny black that reminded me of a high end vehicle interior, and a slightly burnt orange vinyl with a nice metallic shine to it. On the front cover, I wanted to go with a somewhat classic style of a border that had the title and some simple elements within, and I thought it would be fun to make that border a hockey rink, and I'm really happy with how it came out! It's not too in your face, but you CAN tell what it is.

Figuring out how to do the car was the biggest challenge, how to turn it into a Cricut friendly design, what size to make it, etc. I like how it came out, but I think I might go add a heart to the license plate at some point. It's not quite big enough to put any letters/numbers there, but I think a little heart would work great and fill that space in nicely.

On the back cover I wanted to keep it simple (to save myself weeding time... >.>) so I pulled out one of the main news headlines from the story, and some of Shane's texts. With the texts, I put them on the left side since they're ones Ilya is reading, and I put a blank space in between the second and third to leave that space where Ilya's response would've gone but didn't.

Hi, that is such a lovely thing to say. I got into binding after seeing a binding of Running on Air (still my favourite fic despite my feelings on JKR). So I dived into yt tutorials and after watching Jess Less's unhinged fic binding video, I bound my first Sports Night fanfiction. It wasn't anything to look at but I was hooked. So I'd recommend that just for the fun of it.

But what really made me fall in love with it were the videos by Bitter Lemon Bindery. She has gorgeous ASMR binding videos which make the process look much neater than it is (especially when I do it :D) but also tutorials like this one which is the most comprehensive one I have ever watched and I watch A LOT binding videos. I wish I had found that one when I was starting out. I also recommend DASbookbinding videos because he is just a master bookbinder, but they are slightly more advanced. I still love listening to him and learn new things from him.

As for the text itself, I used to labor with it myself for hours and hours on end, and you still will if you want to play with it and add artistic flair, but what took the longest was just formatting the fic to look like a book. Then I discovered a post on here by Blak Books Bindery (you can just Google it they also have a website) who created free macros that you can just put into your word processor like Word (they give you a step by step on how to do it) and with like three clicks it does the magic and spits it out formatted. I love it. I can't believe I ever worked without it. And then you can continue to play with the text and headings and tweaks that make it into an art form.

After I save it as a pdf I usually put it into BookbinderJS which is just an online JavaScript app (again just Google it) and it helps me to print it to the size I need.

I had so much fun binding my first book for the @misc-marauders-fests Marauders Spring Bind Exchange!

Binding the orphaned Wolfstar fix-it fic Remain in Light for @z-eel was such a great way to learn the process, which I loved even more than I expected to. I'm already working on my next bind — it's way more fun than doing all the things I'm supposed to be working on!

Before I shipped it away, I brought it to my studio lighting class to take a few photos (which my classmate is fine with me sharing) to remember it by, and I'm so glad I did. I may not have you anymore, but I'll love you forever, little book <3

Thank you all the friends who hyped me up and kept me motivated when I was in the thick of the "blood, sweat, and tears" portion!

Finally, I couldn't have done it without the middle-aged Australian man behind the DAS Bookbinding YouTube channel. Making a case binding at 2 a.m. would have been a lot worse without this channel, and I can't recommend it enough!

This is one of my first fic bindings. I tried using photo paper for the first time, and I adored the result. I still need to correct a few things while binding, but I think I'm making good progress.