#my typeset

Materials used:

case covers - 1mm binders board spine stiffener - cardstock cover material - fish leather (blue, dyed with orange alcohol based dye) hair - synthetic hair (black grey and light brown) tail - calf leather, braided

inner book paper book block - Munken Pure 100gsm endpapers - marbled paper by @renato-crepaldi endbands - silk thread, bead on the front, 3 colours (variation between head and tail endband) edge decoration - 3 sided graphite edges, burnished and waxed

This typeset breaks quite a few rules. First, it's a fic in French, and second it's not hosted on AO3, so I had to adapt the cover a little bit as best as I could. I don't intend to make this a habit, but this fic is quite special to me. Without getting too much into because it's very personal, it is one of the fics that introduced me to the world of fandoms, and I just had to typeset it.

What I tried to make is something less based on the text and more based on my memories of my first read-through. Those memories are fairly old and, I'm sure, very skewed by time and by my own feelings about the fic. They evoke mostly nostalgia and wonder at the fic and absurdity and annoyance at how inconvenient it was to read it. I invite you to click to link at the top to take a look at what it still looks like. That's a look people who where on Internet at the time (2007-8) will be quite familiar with: rough, clunky and blocky, full of awkward compositions and bright colors.

I tried to have all of that in the typeset. Surreal beauty, because this fic was nothing short of a miracle for me, mixed with weird clunkiness and inconvenient things, like the absence of folio (page number) which is really annoying but that was very much the way things were. The only clue you had as to where you were in the fic was how deep you were in the webpage. Good luck closing the tab and then finding where you left off lol.

Another example, I quite liked how at the time scene breaks were sometimes written with the pairing's initials - meaning JSJSJSJS. So 2010s.

Of course, there is also the text laid out on the full spread. Inconvenient? Hard to get printed? In bad taste? All of those, but that's kind of the point too. Stupid and beautiful. I hope I captured some of that.

This is also my biggest typeset so far. Nearly 2cm thick! It sure makes for such a satisfying book to hold!

Sooo, about this typeset, what can I say? It was a joy and a pain to create this typeset to meet certain requirements in page count and size as well as getting to use wonderful book illustrations by Alphonse Mucha. Some typos were found, others, well now they stare me in the eye...

While the chapter start pages for Carmilla (on the left) were simply the original frames and illustrations with the text replaced by the text of Carmilla, I wanted The Vampyr (on the right) to look the similar, but yet different from the first story. There was no way around sticking to Mucha, because, well, nothing else went as well with is style than his style. After some experimenting with different works of Mucha I went with his moon and stars cycle in addition to the 1903 cover the 'Paris illustre' and the lithography for Flirt biscuits by the company Lefèvre Utile (today still known as LU)' from 1899 to tie them together.

The Carmilla typeset is actually a merge with the main text sourced from Project Gutenberg and notes sourced from a version found at the University of Pennsylvania. (I also learned the word 'odylic' from these notes. Before I'd have considered it simply a typo XD)