#imp press

My attempt at a pretty shot of it....along with all (well, most of) my Capri books 😀

I had a ton of fun making this! The idea probably exceeded my design skills by about two thousand percent but I think it was pretty fun regardless. Thank you @wrenaspun for the idea help, font help and for making the Guerin's Jewelers ad come to life! And thanks again to @quelmdn for her amazing art. I used Electric Zine Maker for this and while it's probably not the best program for all your photoshop needs it is free an it is very cute!

So the idea was for this to be a half binding, where half of the front was bookcloth and half was marbled paper. As you can see the font of the title took up quite a bit more than that, and it became more like a three quarters binding. Will I eventually regret not putting some bookcloth on the outer edge? Maybe. It's pretty sturdy paper so I hope it'll be okay.

I used some marbled cream and gold paper for the endpapers. These are the marbled jute paper from Mulberry Papers and I have two 8x11s of almost every color in my stash. Very handy for situations like this, I was able to find something perfect without needing to order anything (unlike my other bindings...)

Here's a pic of the back.

Ugh I just love it, it's way simpler than the other books I've done lately but it really gives the marbled paper a chance to shine. That paper is Crepaldi, of course, and the bookcloth is duo (I am going to LOSE IT when I run out of my stash of duo, it's beautiful and I love it so much, I don't know what I'm going to do). All the gold, including the bands on the front and back, are HTV. I did protect the marbled paper with parchment while I was ironing it on but it did surprisingly well and the heat didn't damage the paper at all.

So I thought this was a really interesting project because I wanted to use the original work but add to it. I...acquired a PDF of Pet (let me have this one, I bought 2 official english copies of the short stories AND a Polish one I can't even read!) and messed with the margins a bit to make more room for Lucky Clover's notes. Here's what it looks like inside.

This whole thing was done in Libre Office, by the way. I'm sure there's a better program out there that would have done this WAY easier but I didn't want to have to learn how to use Adobe (or pay for it, honestly). But so the little notes are added with textboxes and placed next to their respective quotes, and the quotes themselves are highlighted with highlighters used for bibles, which is apparently a whole subset of office supplies I never knew about! I needed those highlighters specifically because I wanted to have archival color (no idea if regular highlighters are, these are just the only things that came up from a quick search) AND they're really good because they are made not to bleed through really thin bible paper. So on regular paper you can barely see them through the other side at all. They're great! Thanks bible highlighters, I know you thought you would be used for more holy purposes but really there's no better writer than Pacat, so you're in good hands!

So the other problem was that some of the notes were too long to shove into the margins, even after I had made them bigger than normal. That meant post-it notes! Now these aren't actual post-it notes, obviously (I can't imagine how terrible it would be to line those up in the printer) but I used colored printer paper and cut them to size, and it worked out. I used a bit of glue to get them down, and made it so that all of them fold away from the text so that everything is still readable. And then I made some of them poke out the top and sides, because I liked the way it looked.

There are little doodles throughout, some of which I colored in with a highlighter, and I the first word in each section is in a scribbly font, which I thought was funny. All of the notes are likewise in a handwritten font (Amanda Rose) and slightly rotated so that they're not in line with the text.

I also did not trim any of the sides of this textblock, so it's kind of uneven (deckled edges are common on the long side of the textblock, not so much on the top and bottom) but I kind of needed all the space. No endbands in this one either, I wanted to keep it more notebooky and the uneven pages meant it would have been impossible to do anyway. Everything else was bound normally, so aside from the two thousand years it took me to typeset this it was a pretty easy bind.

Oh, and last but not least, the endpapers:

For the endpapers I went with a subtle white wave, similar but still different from the first binding's more stylized gold waves. The back of this one matches the back of the original as well.

(ignore the glue mishaps I had with this one (and also the janky cutting job I did lol) the author copy was much better I promise!)

And I reused the title page again (with the name changed, obviously) and since the title was so long on the first one and so short on the second I elongated it with a few decorative pieces.

The biggest challenge with this one was how short it was; less than 30 pages, and I had to pad it out a little with some blank pages at the end. It sits...okay in the binding, but really I don't think this kind of case is the best solution to such a short work. I didn't want to change it to something else, though, because I wanted them to look similar when they sat on the shelf. And it worked! But it was a little janky to get it in there. And the book itself sits nicely, the case closes without any problem, so I'm happy with it.

The endpapers, beautiful Renato Crepaldi papers that I knew I was going to use for this the instant I came across them on his instagram. They're meant to evoke a sunset (although they also look a lot like Jupiter to me--but the sunset part was what they were meant to look like, and the papers are part of the Skyscapes collection, so. Yeah.). It's so pretty up close, there are some really cool pictures on Crepaldi's instagram if you want to look at them more closely.

The spine, which echoes the wolf and moon theme from the front (I really like the spine, it's so small and usually so hard to line up right but this came out just perfectly)

The title page, foiled with toner reactive foil--boyfriend designed everything and he really liked this title page, even if it's the name of the first chapter and not the actual collection of stories, lol. But I liked it so much I couldn't help but include it. Along with:

All of the font designs and curlies were made by the boyfriend, but the pictures are all Arthur's. I found this reddit post where someone had collected all of the pictures Arthur draws in his journal, so these pencil drawings (well, printed pencil drawings) are all Arthur's actual pictures from the game. I thought it was such a neat touch and, because Arthur's journal is an important part of not just the game but this story as well, I thought it was important to include them. There are a few more random pictures for chapter breaks, etc. but they're not super fancy like this.

So here's some of the inside pages. The stories were split into these three categories, and the idea behind the borders was that canon was the most straightforward so it got a simple line border, canon divergent started to get more complicated and then alternate universe built even further on that complication. These pages are all made with toner reactive foil--I still can't seem to get the foil to have great coverage even though I used a laminator to set it, but they're still super shiny and I think it was successful.

Endpapers are very watery to go with the ocean theme on the front cover.

And here's the back just for good measure. Nothing fancy but getting that HTV to stay straight was a bitch. It's still a little wonky if you look super close but nothing as bad as my first attempt:

You can probably only see it if you zoom in, but on the first attempt the border was way too thin and it just was a nightmare to put down (this is the same bookcloth as the other pictures by the way, the lighting is just way worse in these pics). The front cover was also kind of janky and looking at it now I don't think it's even close to straight. But the real reason this cover ended up being discarded and not used was the spine:

(ignore fuzzy monster in the corner and all the junk in the back) The spine on this one was so crooked that I couldn't in good faith give this to the author. But it's okay (I say as I cry over my ruined duo bookcloth) because it was a good learning experience and the other copies turned out much better.

So yeah! The direct-to-film transfer turned out great, and it's probably something I'll use again in the future. I really like the combination of that and the HTV, it looks so snappy.

So since this is a shorter story than some of the others I went back to a 4x6 book. It still feels very nice in hand though, I think I'm getting better at either setting the textblock in the case or just measuring better (probably that last one, I'm usually too impatient to measure correctly) but these two books are probably some of the nicest set books I've made yet.

The back has a little flourish on it too, just to spice things up a little.

Endpapers are from Wagara Studio, I seriously love this chiyogami paper, it's almost like fabric and it's so easy to use. Setting this book and my previous binding were so easy with this paper. It would make an awesome cover as well, it seems really durable.

Some inside pics, the title page and the little section break image. I really love the title page image and I kind of wish I would have done that for the cover, but the design is so detailed that it would be impossible to do with HTV and it's too big to just do with the cardstock. So it had to be split like it is, but I'm still glad this picture got included.

The bookcloth is really not this stripey/checkery, I don't know why it came out like this in pictures. Ignore the mess in the back. I have to for sure clean up my little table before starting on the next project.

Anyway, not too many notes on the actual binding process this time. I did end up making an entire cover--HTV and everything--that turned out to be too small (remember that thing I said about me being mad at measuring?) because I made the spine 9mm instead of 10mm and like a dummy I forgot to test it with the textblock before doing all the work of finishing the cover. That one mm is such a small difference but it meant that the book couldn't be closed and so I had to scrap it and start over. Gonna be testing my covers for sure before I spend so much time on the design work. Gutters on this were 5mm, foiling on the cloth (I think it's dubletta cloth) was done with HTV, foiling on the cardstock cover was done with toner reactive foil.