Miri’s Bindery

Although I've only made one casebound so far, I've recieved multiple requests to make a tutorial. And well, I'm not that good. But I can share some of the online resources that have helped me.

• Youtube

DAS bookbinding - lots of bookmaking methods, explained in detail.

Annesi Bindings - mostly casebinding, and other useful things.

Dan Siebel's kettle stitch tutorial -short video on how to do a kettle stitch. Filmed up-close.

• Tumblr

Renegade Publishing - a group of independent fanbinders. They have a discord (though it's 18+) and answer binding related questions on the blog.

Armoredsuperheavy - founder of renegade publishing. Maintains multiple docs about the full process of making a book.

Hedgehog-moss's post about bookbinding - beginner information, links to resources

•Reddit

r/bookbinding - a large community of people. You can share your progress, ask questions. You may get criticism though. Expect brutal honesty.

•Other

Alternative bookbinding supplies - We don't all have the correct supplies lying around. It's fine.

How to: Headbands - article about sewing headbands.

Don't forget to use acid free materials! Acidic paper/glue decays with time, causing your book to turn yellow and fall apart. PVA and weath paste are commonly used adhesives.

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Here are a few delightful wood engravings from a recent gift showing the various processes that go into binding a book. This little pamphlet is entitled A Short History of Bookbinding and a Glossary of Styles and Terms Used in Binding … .printed in London at the Chiswick Press for the bookbinder Joseph William Zaehnsdorf in 1895.These images were probably printed from metal plates that were made from the original wood engravings. The engravings are not attributed, as was the case for most commercial engravings.

Click or tap on the images to see the definitions for these activities as provided in the booklet’s glossary. 

I’ve always loved collecting books. I’ve got enough books that my friends make jokes about using stacks of books as furniture - not true, but close enough.  But there is one type of book that I’ve never been able to get my hands on: fanfiction and other independently written, underground work. Especially work with queer themes and/or erotica.

It’s frustrating that fanfiction isn’t generally publishable or sellable. It’s a shame that creators could spend months or years laboring over a phenomenal piece of work and never see a dime for it, never see it in print. So I finally hit on an idea, an attempt to thank the authors of these wonderful underground works, without wandering into legality issues.  I decided to learn how to make books. These books are not for sale and are gifts to the authors.

So I have been working on this for a couple of months and here are the first results. These are the very first books I have bound.

My guinea pigs:

Flyboys by @gefionne Bad Things by @ellabesmirched

Step 1. Making bookbinding tools.   I realized very quickly that I needed a sewing frame and a book press. If I were to order these things I would have spent anywhere from $150 - $500. Luckily my family likes to make things. So I enlisted my dad to help me make some simple tools. cost: $30 in materials and an afternoon.

Step 2. Typesetting. Microsoft Word lets you print in “booklet” form, which allows you to create signatures from folded 8.5x11" paper. Each book takes a half to a full day to format.

Step 3. Printing. I am lucky enough to have a robust color laser printer at my disposal. Lightweight 20lb bond / 75gsm copy paper is what I used. This isn’t ideal for books, but it’s inexpensive, easy to procure, and doesn’t choke the laster printer. Perhaps in the future I can do an edition on super thin Bible paper, if I can find a printer that will print on it.

Step 4. Folding, Punching. Perhaps the most tedious part: Every sheet of paper must be folded individually. Then you assemble the signatures and use an awl to punch holes for sewing.  Flyboys was 888 pages, which means 222 sheets of paper to fold.

Step 5. Sewing the text block. Now it’s time for tool #1, the sewing frame. This worked exactly as designed, holding the linen tapes steady while I sewed around them. A brick in a rag serves as a weight to hold the text block down while sewing.

Step 5. Gluing. Once the text block is sewn, I glue the end papers to both sides. Then it goes into tool #2, the press, with the spine edge poking out. I glue the signatures together, then apply the headbands and mull as further reinforcement. I leave the book in the press overnight.

Step 6. Making the Case. The case or cover. I’m making half-bound cases, which means there is fabric on the spine, but the boards are covered in decorative paper.

For Flyboys, I went with a “Hux’s hair and verdigris” theme of green cloth, copper printed paper and copper endpapers.

For Bad Things, I wanted murderous blood spatters. I ended up with black cloth, black and red marbled paper and red metallic endpapers.

Step 7. Assembly. The most nerve-wracking step. This is where you glue the block to the case. One shot deal. If you do it crooked, the book is crooked forever. YIKES! After you glue it, you put it in the press overnight again.

Step 8. Ex Libris. I have a few old ex libris labels with Aubrey Beardsley art, I think that’s an appropriate choice to pair with the queer and sexy, so I am adding them inside the front endpapers in the traditional spot. An ex libris label is a traditional way to signify who the book belongs to.

Step 9. Make author squeal with glee. My favorite step.

Okay, so.

My preference is "yes." Yes, I want you to archive them. Yes, I want you to save them. I've worked to preserve 1960s teen pulp mags, for fuck's sake, it can't get much worse than that, and I'm grateful to have them.

With that said, pick any or all of the following options to make your physical printouts last longer: --select acid-free paper --bind by sewing, not stapling --store in archival sleeves, like the ones you use for old comic books And now, pick any or all of the following options to make my life easier as a historian (or, you know, the lives of the historians who come after me): --include the title --include the author's name --include the fandom name --include which version of the canon, if relevant (e.g. the OG Transformers show vs the Michael Bay movies) --include the date, or at least year, of publication --include the summary --include the site of origin, including the URL All of these things are called provenance and help not only to identify a specific work, but to place it within its cultural context. As an amusing example: I recently got into James Bond, and decided to go through every fic in the main pairing tag, in chronological order. There came a point where suddenly, out of nowhere, there were like two solid pages of nothing but A/B/O, which I previously had not seen at all. I had a suspicion, so I looked it up, and sure enough--those two pages appeared within just a couple of weeks of the corresponding Supernatural episode. Having publication dates let me determine that. If I were a historian trying to piece together a long-ago puzzle instead of going "lol I live on the hellsite, I bet I know exactly where this came from," that would be a huge datapoint. I could probably find a similar sudden explosion in other fandoms, as well--and if we're going far enough in the future, if Supernatural were to just vanish off the face of the planet along with its entire fandom, historians could still trace that it existed and even determine some of its events based on when certain tropes begin to appear in other fandoms. And further, the fact that its tropes and major events appear in so many other fandoms would allow those historians to say "this must have been a very, very popular story." (This isn't just me making shit up to sound important, by the way. This is literally how we have records of a lot of things throughout antiquity and even into the Renaissance. The more copies there are of something, or the more references that are made to a thing in other things, the more likely it is for at least part of it to survive. This is literally how we know about Shakespeare's two lost plays--he was a popular enough playwright that quartos of his plays were advertised for sale.) Whew! Now let's get into stuff you could do that would make me, as a historian, scream with delight if I were to open your folder full of labeled, acid-free fanfiction fifty years from now: --write a little something about why you picked this particular fic to preserve in hard copy when doing so is bulky and time-consuming compared to the easy instant storage of the internet, yes, even if your reason is "I'm trying not to use my phone in bed because the screen keeps me awake but this story is soothing to reread" --write a little something about who you are, even if it's just "my name is X, my age is Y, I live in Z, I printed this out in 2022" And last but not least: Marginalia. Marginalia. Marginalia, my beloved. That's when you write your thoughts in the columns on the sides, underline stuff, circle it, and so on. Having marginalia means I actually get a window into your thoughts as you read--your perspective, stuff that stuck out to you, places the story made you feel some kind of serious emotion. And yes, this goes for everything. Villain A kills Hero B and you write "YOU MOTHERFUCKER" in the margin, that tells Future Historian Me that you really loved Hero B, you were invested in seeing her succeed, and that this scene really resonated with you. One of my most treasured possessions in the fandom museum is a copy of the novelization of the Help! movie the Beatles did. This particular copy is very worn--unsurprising, it was a cheap paperback even when it was printed--but also, its original owner apparently took it to the movie theatre and

wrote notes in the margins indicating all the things happening onscreen that weren't in the book. What does this tell me? WELL. Let's go ahead and take a look: 1) the written ink doesn't look any newer than the book, so I'm guessing a little when I say this was the original owner and in the theatre, but I have an actual datapoint I'm basing that on 2) based on handwriting and the main demographic of the Beatles audience at the time, this was a young woman, probably a teenager. 3) she went to see the movie more than once (some notes are in pencil, some in ink, but the handwriting is all the same) 4) she was dedicated to making sure every moment of the movie was preserved. This was an era before home video players, so once the movie left theatres, she had no guarantee of seeing it again. 5) while the book is worn, it's not beaten all to shit. It was read a lot, but there's no evidence it was mistreated, so it was probably a prized or at least respected possession.

What can I extrapolate from this, with the understanding that I mean "what theories can I reasonably form but not prove"? Well. She was probably a pretty big fan, since she went to see the movie at least twice and also bought the book. Maybe she wanted to keep the story after the movie was gone. Maybe she was looking for answers for some teen mag contest like "find these things in the Help! movie and win a chance to meet the Beatles." Maybe she had a friend who wasn't allowed to go to the movie. You know what the most tantalizing possibility is to me, although I'll never be able to prove it and actual ethics as a historian mean I can only present it as one among many possibilities? Maybe she did it as a source reference for writing fanfiction. We don't know. We can't know, because I have no idea who the original owner was or if she's even still alive and no way to trace her. But that? In terms of fandom history, that is a fucking gold mine. Pure 24-karat all through. From a strictly historical view, that's worth more than the animation cel I've got in there, and I paid over a hundred bucks for that thing.

Make me scream in glee by doing these things!

@sailorzeo can confirm she just saw me do just that, when she handed me an old book of printed fanfiction (actual quote upon her finding it: “SQUEEAK!!”). I’m looking through it right now, and when I say whatever you write, WHATEVER you write, provides provenance and context?

This is from 1996. Today it would almost certainly be measured in total word count. But in Ye Olde Days, you had to watch how much content you were putting per part because dial-up was slow and people wanted to read their fic when they were still young; measuring in pages or K/KB (kilobytes, not thousands) was the standard.

This is literally a look at the customs of fandom before broadband or even DSL were widespread. And it’s a single handwritten page. Look at everything there! How Zeo (and the author) chose to organize it; the length compared to modern-day fic; the way it’s segmented. (Looking at the fic itself, the formatting is also way different than modern formatting. Good, but different.)

And at least in theory, via the Wayback Machine or archive.org, I could still go find this fic online, because the name of the webpage is included on the printouts.

When you are sourcing online information for research papers and the like, you have to put the date you found the info, because it can change on the web page. The information on the reference page is roughly

"Author, title, journal name, volume, number, year, url, date accessed" or

do....do historians want that too?