#void spiders

The Starless Road is a beautiful Silmarillion fanfic that tells the tale of Fingon's quest into the Void to find Maedhros. If anyone hasn't read it it is sublime and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When I saw @missmists's stunning typeset for the story in the Renegade 2025 Typeset exchange slideshow, I literally gasped out loud and I knew it was one I wanted to bind for my own collection. They did such a wonderful job and it is so beautiful! They also very kindly resized the typesetting to fit A4 when I was going to struggle to get this printed with the original settings. Huge kudos, I really really appreciated it.

I managed to get the text block printed and sewn a while ago but the cover design fought me every step of the way.

I tried a bunch of different designs, but the interaction with the spider queen in the void is my favourite part of the story so I had to make the cover very spider focused! The illustration on the cover was taken from a satirical political bookplate designed by Lorenzo Brunet in the early 1900s. The cover was designed in Canva, printed on matte photo paper, then covered in soft touch laminate before being adhered to the book board.

So thrilled I have this on my shelf now, it’s such a lovely fic.