#fic binding

One Elephant at a Time by fundlebundle

"The flame cast strange shadows on his face and made the Dark Mark dance on his pale skin. It had been ten years since he’d last seen Draco Malfoy."

It's hard to believe that I started working on the typeset for this bind in October of last year. Nearly eleven months later, I have finally managed to bring my vision to life.

This bind has a foiled cover and spine, hand sewn silk endbands, and edges that have been painted and gauffered. It also includes my first attempt at a hollow.

You can find more pictures and information about my process under the cut.

***this fic is an unfinished WIP on Ao3***

I had the absolute pleasure of being paired with @cloudyskies48 and their absolutely bittersweet vidow retelling of the Four Swords manga, The Shadow and the Light. I really hope I managed to capture the longing and tragedy of your fic in the bind.

A love letter for my favorite fanfic: Boy in the Box

(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.

Utilities Included written by @strawhattery illustrated by @newttxt

Mold in the shower, burns on the carpet, and nothing but hot sauce and pickles in the kitchen. Sanji doesn't know it yet, but the apartment he's moving into—and the alpha he's sharing it with—will change his life.

I've spent... about six month on this bind and I am beyond proud. I've been obsessed with this very specific sewn board binding style pioneered by Gary Frost; a hardcover book with a softcover spine. And after a year or so of begging, my coworker agreed to teach me.

Every time we got together she started her spiel with "Okay so he did this part in the weirdest way possible--"

Anyway. I'm so proud. I'm going to do it again and again and again (but I will remember my thimbles this time, because this book has a double endband which I sewed nearly a month ago and I'm still missing some feeling in my fingers).

I'm so happy that Bree and Quip allowed me to bind this fic for this experiment. I hope they know that as it sat on my work desk for the last six months, the number of comments I got about "you're binding your rental agreement??" was absurdly high. May they never know the truth. I'm not sure leaving printed fic lying around at work is the best decision.

I clawed my way into the light, but the light is just as scary by romcommie, binding by DCB Bindery

Summary: You're lying. You're leaving the important parts out again. You're ignoring what's happening in the house, you're ignoring the red string that's supposed to be leading the way, time-adherent. Of course. That's because all strings can be cut, all strings can wind up dead ends, all things can be taken away, including time. The string's not red because of the poetry of it all, bub. It's red because someone's bled all over it.

Ever since I found the beloved name, exiled, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it or the series it belongs to. Thank you to @bromcommie for letting me bind this incredible work for this year’s Binderary!

Specs: Accordion binding with hardcovers and half A5 sheets as tabs, A6, 31 pages.

On the process: This was one hell of a gauntlet, from typesetting free verse poetry to my first foray into accordion binding. I ended up quite pleased with the typeset, but it was impossible to take proper pictures of all the details, so please forgive my rambling description.

This singular accordion binding contains both parts of the series, which starts at either end of the book. Each side reads like a regular book, with coordinating hard covers, title pages, etc. The two parts are printed on opposite sides of the same sheets. So depending on which cover you read from, you’re getting a different book in the series. A few elements in the title, series, and other supplemental pages are inspired by the use of morse code in the poems.

Mirroring the narrative, all elements in the common denominator of all truth start off in red. The text then gradually turns black as we arrive at the end. This ‘back cover’ is where the beloved name, exiled starts on the other side. Similarly, the gradient is present where all elements start in black and goes to red, mirroring where the narrative starts and ends.

Given the two characters featured in these two parts and their journeys, the significance of these opposite colors representing their endings was so fun for me to execute.

The gradient is also most prominent and easiest to follow along the line on the bottom where the page numbers are, an exciting element to bring to the accordion binding. Except it was impossible to take pictures of the effect because the accordion expands into a very long book. But I promise the line on the bottom goes from red to black and vice versa for each respective work in the series.

The binding itself was really tricky, not least because the paper I used was very thin. Glueing every single page was finicky, tedious, and took a lot of trial and error. I refuse to discuss the skew.

Overall, this was actually a fun challenge to typeset and an interesting new type of binding for me to try. I just wish it wasn’t so hard to take pictures highlighting all the cool details I was excited about executing.

not to be a cornball but i am actually in tears as @organic0ranges did what i can only call a downright beautiful job binding the soviet montage and winners-verse. the books were so thoughtfully put together and so so so spot on with the imagery, motifs and aesthetics i'd imagined for both works. i cannot put into words how much this means to me seeing my writing like this 🥹🥹🥹🥹

usps getting this to me so fast was such a great way to start my week. more details also up on their ao3!!