#romcommie

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.