#spock replies

Totally!! So i use a beefy paper guillotine, not one of the ones with a simple up and down lever on the blade, but one of the BIG boys that gives you a better mechanical advantage

It was a bit of an investment, but the single most useful piece of equipment I've bought for bookbinding!!

And i can speak to some of the other options too!! An xacto knife is going to give you more trouble than it feels like, because the length of the blade itself is pretty short. Once you get a little ways down into your text block, it's going to be REAL easy to go wandering away from your straight edge, or just for the handle to start bumping into things and causing problems.

I know that chisels are a classical solution for trimming books like this because they gave a long, flat surface that's nice and easy to slide along, but it is also relatively dangerous if you don't take care with your setup!! I used scrap wood and G clamps to try to chisel trim a book a while back, and let's just say the stability was... not good. I stopped after chiseling my knuckle pretty good, but i did recently buy a book press for giving this another go with the right equipment. You can also use specialized ploughs to trim like this, but chisels are probably a more affordable entry point.

But! Sanding is what i currently use when a book is too large to fit in my guillotine! And I know exactly what you mean about the pages bulging out. When im sanding a book, i clamp the edges of the pages HARD between scrap board and scrap wood and go from there with an orbital sander. It isn't a complete solution, I still find little fluffs of paper dust in the pages after I take it out, but it does give me enough to go on. The clamping I photographed here is for art rather than sanding, but it's a similar idea! I want the pages to he operating as a UNIT, i don't want them to be capable of separating and moving independently. For sanding, I don't use the carriage bolts, i use heavier duty clamps, but you can kind of see how clamping forces the text block to act more like a solid piece and less like individual leafs of paper

And I'll say, these days, im using an orbital sander and am picky about how flat things get, but one of my older edge painting projects is pretty UN-flat snd still worked extremely well! My single-volume tian guan ci fu was sanded by hand, which was a terrible idea and gave me so many blisters, and in the end, I didn't yet all of the sawtooth sanded out before I said it was good enough. You can still see the shadows of the little valleys on the left here. But it was still flat enough for a full art treatment! Once you clamp the edges and stop them from swelling, sanding can definitely get you to a good art surface one way or another (though i definitely recommend an orbital sander over your bare hands lmao)

I'll say that... it's not impossible, but it's a long shot! I've taken on a fewwwww commissions over the years, and they can be very rewarding, but I also find them very stressful in a way that gift bindings aren't. And they don't give me the same dopamine hit of binding wherever the impulse takes me, so they kind of hit me coming and going!

Hmmm. I think that at this moment in time, the winter SADs have me in a vice grip, and just carrying out basic life maintenance has been a hell of a struggle. So I'm not going to get mad at anyone who wants to hit me up, but the odds of even getting a response message right now are iffy (just look at how long it to me to remember to reply to this). Even when it's less winter, I think it will be a long shot, but you might catch me in the right mood! I will say that for any prospective fanbinding commissions, I will ask the commissioner to get authorial permission before I start working. I don't do that when I'm working for free, but when money enters the picture, my feelings change.

I do have a lot of (self-taught) hobby background with drawing, but it's almost entirely in very cartoony styles emphasizing linework and only shading under duress! It probably helps me somewhat in terms of painting (I'm used to identifying edges of shapes, and it gave me some practice with keeping things proportional). But I've found painting to be a very different experience from sketching, the way an image is built up isn't the same.

A term you might run into is painting 'general to specific', and my art actually isn't the best example of that at this point! I'm used to like, draw an oval for the head, figure out where it's pointing, then start doing lines. But painting emphasizes blocks of color, so perhaps after painting a tan oval, the next step would be to add dark tan for the shadowed side of the face and jawline. I'm not doing a great job describing that, haha.

Here's an example of what i mean. This artist works in a digital medium, but the process of digital rendering (something I'm also not experienced with) shares a lot of similarities. I watch his videos to try to absorb some of those ideas, but it doesn't come naturally to me yet at all!

https://youtube.com/shorts/0TWJ2pznc84?si=HeHuYzQdYWCUH8Z-

And in my painting classes, I've been an outlier for having that sketching background at all. I'm not sure anyone else I've taken lessons with has had something similar. So it really isn't a barrier to entry!! I think it's helping me to advance quickly, but it's also slowing me down on some conceptual basics. If you want to learn painting, I think you should go for it! I've found that just GOING for it helps with a lot of the learning curve (how the paint handles, how the brushes handle). I definitely feel some frustration as a beginner too, but I try to hold on to the high points and be positive about the experience, so I dont trick myself out of having a good time!

Ahhh, yes! I do use a guillotine. My model is vevor, but that actual listing is gone now. It's pretty close to this amazon model, it's definitely more POWERFUL than the simple lever ones you sometimes see in craft spaces. Mine handles up to 500ish pages without trouble, and past that, I've tried chisel trimming (without the right press to hold it, i got a bloody outcome and a mangled book) and using a handheld orbital sander (slow and VERY messy, but works)

I do not have a better tutorial for k118 at hand, apologies. I went from the descriptions of the construction that you can find at the top of search results, then used the tightbacked leather covering methods discussed by das bookbinding in his videos. I'm hoping to maybe make a tutorial of some kind soon, because it always makes me sad when I can't answer yes to this question, so one may be forthcoming!

However, especially if you're new to bookbinding, I'd definitely recommend other styles like casebinding or coptic binding first, and getting comfortable with how leather handles on something like a bog-standard case before trying a tightbacked style. I didnt, my first attempts at leatherwork weren't k118, but tightbacked binding with laced on boards, and the learning curve was BRUTAL, it was the closest I've gotten to being completely discouraged away from a bookbinding skill. Whether or not you do a leather k118, you're going to be wrapping a a sheet of material where one side is covered in paste around a three dimensional object, manipulating it to do the turn-ins, and trying not to get adhesive on the pretty side of the covering material

Sure!!!! So, I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand, but if you go back through my bookbinding tag, there are other replies I've got about the materials for making a book specifically. The renegade publishing blog also has resource documents that walk through the bookbinding process and include links to educational materials, etc. So for here, I'll focus on the danmei side of things!

So, a fun feature about these books is that they tend to run LONG. I've seen a number of people try to take up bookbinding in google docs, and honestly, it's doing things on hard mode. For many danmei, it's basically impossible. I think my EARLIEST earliest attempt at svsss began in gdocs, and that's not a super long novel, but gdocs was choking on it. A word processor on your desktop is going to be your best bet. Personally, i invested in a microsoft office license, because it was familiar and i could afford it. But the free parallel to that will be libre office, which does basically everything word can do, with just minor differences.

On the fancy end of bookbinding software, affinity, indesign, and microsoft publisher are also names you may hear tossed around. These can do fancier, more artistic layouts, but also come with a heavier price tag. And because i had webnovels on my radar from the start, i wanted something ROBUST. I wanted to be able to dump all of the husky and his white cat shizun into a single file and work from it. And i did eventually do that! Being able to typeset a single file rather than repeat each step across several is great, especially since i tend to tweak design choices as i go.

For danmei, you're also going to want a robust printer. I have a color laser that's been an absolute beast of a machine, but a black and white laser can get you a long ways, and monochrome designs can be very elegant. You don't want an HP brand printer, their toner subscription practices are downright predatory, but Brother and Canon are names I've seen recommended highly. You probably don't want an inkjet printer, because long books take a LOT of ink. The one exception would be if you can find an affordable ink tank printer.

And the last major thing i can think of is that if your main computer is a laptop, consider typesetting with an external mouse and keyboard! Danmei novels are split into lots of short chapters, frequently split across just as many web pages, with lots of footnotes to format, and laptops are convenient but not ergonomic. Doing too much on there is just asking for a repetitive strain injury. I've done it, but often paid for my sins in pain! And your laptop keyboard may start complaining too, I'm almost certain my first typeset of mdzs was the nail in the coffin for my last laptop's keyboard, haha

Sure thing!!! I can't speak to whether the translator here is leaning on mtl, i have a really bad natural sense for that, but they ARE actively, personally engaged on the site, and I've found the translation to be very readable!!