#thingswithwings

Breaking Stuff - a MythBusters vidlet - gen

Breaking stuff is cool.

fic rec! 7K, Leverage OT3

Summary: While he's waiting for the men with the guns to decide what to do with him, Alec thinks about what he'll do if he gets home.

KNOWN ASSOCIATES by @thingswithwings​

Fandom: Captain America Pairing: Steve/Bucky, Steve/everybody else too

Summary Steve Rogers isn’t a self-made man. Or, how a tough little Brooklyn fairy got turned into Captain America, and then turned back.

297k words 823 pages

A heavily researched and vivid portrayal of 1940s NYC queer culture, a journey of identity and growth following Steve to present day.

This book contains an appendix of 27 pages of meticulously annotated sources, bibliography, and notes.

Binding

Printed on Domtar Multipurpose Cream 20# Bond. Sewn with 100% linen thread on 100% linen tapes.  Applied endbands. Trans pride ribbon bookmark.

Half-bound in red cloth and marbled cotton rag paper from India. Endpapers are Cavallini & Co Vintage Office Ephemera. The outer case colors were selected to compliment the colors in the endpapers.

Titles and headers are set in Lydian, for another touch of vintage. (Designed by Warren Chappell in 1938, popular through the 40s-60s and currently undergoing a resurgence in popularity.) The text is set in Garamond.

Big Book Energy

This book was a journey to get done. And most of that was caused by the sheer length.

At 823 pages / 297k words this fic is pushing the bounds of what I normally want to put in a single volume. It's maxed out. This creates additional issues in the binding process.

First, the print spooling process failed. When a story is a real monster it exceeds the memory of some or other component of the print send process. The result is that the file prints, but there will be surprise page transpositions. (e.g. pages 1-367 are fine. Then where 368 should be, you see page 17 instead. Then 369 picks back up as normal)  In this book there were about 15 page transpositions. You don't receive an error message that this has occurred - so you discover them later when you start to fold up the signatures. In total I had to make three trips to do reprints on this book. This took a month.

Next, the spine rounding/backing. I attempted to back the spine, using a hammer to shape the edges of the spine. This worked out well on one copy and not so well on the other, leading to other issues in the construction. I sent the good copy to the author and kept the wonky, out of square one for myself.

Finally, I had to do the final squeeze in my old homemade plywood book press because the book + brass edge boards was too tall to fit inside the victorian copying press I use for most books. This is more difficult to set up right and can easily lead to more wonkiness if it’s out of square in the press. I have to stand on top of the press to bolt it down.