Teleport Books

"Winter of the White Wolf" by K. LeCrone

This was a Fandom Trumps Hate commission from last year, which I've finally remembered to post pictures of!

I had a really fun time incorporating beads into the design here. One of the standard styles for sewn headbands is called "bead on edge," with the "bead" being a wrap of thread. I wanted to see if I could make headbands with actual beads, and I think they came out looking pretty good! For the sewn part of the headband I stuck with plain black thread, so that the beads would stay in the spotlight.

I made Andy Weir's Eridian worldbuilding notes into a mini book!

Normally my title pages include my actual city and the date in roman numerals (to mimic the look of traditionally published books), but I am already binding worldbuilding notes; I might as well go full nerd. The page numbers are also in Eridian numbers (affinity publisher cannot automate page numbers in base six; fortunately it's only 231 91 pages long) .

I came up with a heading style before I realized that some headings were much longer than would fit on a single line, but I think the two-line version ended up looking alright for the most part!

I made a slight edit to the text because Andy Weir used red text to tell base 6 numbers apart from base 10 numbers but I was printing in black and white. Rather than messing with a different font I decided to just use the Eridian numerals for base 6, which meant they needed to be defined earlier in the text, so I changed one line and moved one sentence earlier by a couple of paragraphs.

Ficbinding: All-Consuming by ratbones

This is a Guardian zombie apocalypse AU! I'm using @helle-bored's typeset, which had a very neat stenciled/stamped aesthetic. The binding was loosely inspired by the Antarctic-published books that were bound in boards from wooden crates, but I went my own direction with the concept (in part because I wanted to practice sewing on cord with my sewing frame).

I had originally intended to give the wood a natural grayish weathered look (while I have lots of scrap wood in the basement, I didn't have anything suitable that had been sitting outside for years) but the iron acetate & tea combo that I treated the wood with had a much stronger effect than expected. I'm a fan of how it turned out though!

Something different from my normal bookbinding here! This was a gift for my dad, it's a copy of my great-great-grandfather's civil war diary. I bound it in a softcover leather longstitch binding. The stitching around the edge looks kind of like a blanket stitch, but it's actually an edge binding originally intended to be worked in leather lacing, and has more of a braided look to it if you look at it from the edge.

My family doesn't have the original copy of this diary anymore--I was working from a scan of a typewritten copy that was made a generation or two after the original, I'm not sure exactly when. Pieces of the diary feel like they were written after the fact, not day-of, and I frequently found myself wishing I could see what the original pages looked like.

I added a pocket to hold several maps, because they were very helpful to me (not a civil war history buff in the slightest) to put what my ancestor was doing into a larger context. The maps are by Hal Jesperson.

Fun fact I didn't know before making this book: my ancestor's unit was the first to open fire at the battle of Gettysburg! There's a monument to his unit at Gettysburg, so I included a photo of that in the book as well.

This book has reached its recipient, so I can share pictures now! This is Deadset by @pbaintthetb, an amazing Nie Huaisang fic in which Nie Huaisang is murdered and becomes a tgcf-style ghost.

I did a kintsugi-look binding for a different calamity au (ironically, one in which Jin Guangyao was the ghost) but spoilers, this was the fic that I first thought of using it for. And while my first attempt was just a surface design on the cover, I built this into the structure of the book itself. The cover structure is inspired by Ben Elbel's "pixel binding" which is a book cover made of many tiny squares; using irregular pieces here makes it not quite as flexible, but I'm still very happy with the effect.

The individual sections of the cover were glued to a thin, flexible paper, then covered with a decorative paper that I worked down into the spaces between (definitely use paste rather than pva for this). The gold is deco foil, often called toner-reactive foil but it adheres to dry pva as well, so I simply filled the channels with pva and then applied the foil using the head of a pin to apply pressure (you don't need heat when applying it to pva).

For the rounded spine, I used leather pieces so that I could still have the thickness but they would be flexible enough that I wouldn't have to sacrifice the irregular shapes.

Hi!

Apparently I didn't take any process photos -- grumbles at past self -- but basically, it's a series of cutouts. The cover is made of three layers of thinner board, each about the weight of a cereal box. The innermost layer (with the "How Dare You" title) is solid. The next layer has a cutout to frame the first layer's title, and I covered that layer with floral paper and turned the edges in to the inside of the cutout before I glued it down to the layer below. Same with the top layer, turn the edges of the paper under the cutout before gluing the board down to the layer below. Then the outer edges of the blue paper on the top layer wrap around all three layers of the cover. So in the end, it's one solid cover (you can't open all three separately -- which WOULD be pretty cool to do now that I think about it...)

I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!

(which you can listen to here on archive.org)

I made an adjustable punching template!

I got tired of making cardstock templates for my sewing holes every time I made a book with slightly different dimensions, but the premade templates with holes every half inch didn't allow for as much customization as I'd like either (especially since I'm usually sewing around half-inch tapes, which means I want my holes just slightly further than half an inch apart).

So this template may be overkill, but it was fun to design -- it's a hollow triangular ruler, with little pieces that fit inside. The inserts have either two spaced holes (for tapes) or single holes (for kettle stitches) and you can slide them to whatever position you want, then tighten the screws to lock them in place.

Three book-boxes!

This is @rainsfalling's typeset of Mo Du by priest, from 2024's cnovel bookbinding exchange. I love the idea of binding other people's typesets so I can read something for the first time in hard copy, but this is the first time I've done it with a novel rather than with fic (priest's track record is such that I could count on it being worth the effort).

Of course, binding things I haven't read makes for an interesting design challenge. Here is what I knew about Mo Du: police/mystery, there's a cat in this one too, and chapter titles that reference classic literature. So ... I went with the cat, found this paper at a shop in Ithaca, NY last summer, happened to find this plaid fabric on the same shopping trip at a fabric reuse store and thought it paired nicely with the paper, then built the books around that combo.

I made a lying press! This was built using Taylor Toolworks' wooden hand screw clamp kit which I would definitely recommend if you're looking for a way to make an affordable press (only if you have access to a drill press though, or are really confident in your ability to drill straight).

The kit itself was less than $10, although I ended up needing to buy a specific size drill bit, and then you'll need to source your wood too (mine came from my mom's garage).

I think next I am going to make some feet for it so it can be a little taller.

A very purple book! This is Lynchpin by ShanaStoryteller. After being given this purple marbled paper (made by @dcbrierton) I knew I wanted to use it for a Jiang Cheng centric fic. This was typeset by @missaphelion who was kind enough to share her typeset with me.

I wanted to highlight the paper in the cover design so I cut out the letters from a strip of paper for the front title, and then used those cut out letters for the spine title. The last time I did a title cutout I did not have a cutting machine -- this makes it so much easier.

This is what I decided to typeset over my vacation ... one of MDZS's most notorious fanfics, in tiny book form. Unfortunately, the tags filled up all the pages and there was no room for the fic itself! What a shame.

Bookbinding: How Dare You!? / Cheng He Ti Tong by Qi Ying Jun

I also made this for @spockandawe for an exchange! But I wanted to bind it myself, too. Would you believe I made it halfway through this novel before realizing it was by the same author as Are You OK? (the author's name is different on different platforms I guess?) I was like "this author's doing some very neat stuff with transmigration ... hey, wait a sec!"

Since the concept of this novel is transmigrating into a transmigration novel, I made a triple-layer cutout cover. The outermost cover is the "original" novel, followed by the in-universe transmigration novel, and finally the actual novel, where instead of a proper cover design it gets a hastily-written* sharpie title on note paper.

I was going to put more colors in the endbands and fewer in the splatter-painted edges, but it turns out if you only use brown paint for splattered edges ... even if it is a very nice brown in other contexts ... it looks like the book is moldy. So I added some blue too and at that point I thought a multicolored endband would be too much.

My laser printer can't print to the edges of the pages, so for the floral background, I printed just the border on my inkjet printer, and then printed the text of those specific pages afterwards.

There is a typographical easter egg! If you've read the novel, you can see if you can figure it out (it's present on one of the pages pictured here).

Bookbinding: The Imperial Uncle by Da Feng Gua Guo

This is the first of two novels I bound for @spockandawe for a cnovel bookbinding exchange. The Imperial Uncle is pretty short (the Peach Flower House edition is a single volume) and I bound it in two quarto volumes with a brocade bookcloth cover and a bamboo strip spine. The pages are sewn directly to the string tying the spine together. The slipcase is covered with the same brocade bookcloth and decorated with satin cord.