men and women are not opposites. men and women are not enemies. men and women are two parts of a broad coalition which fights against a mutual enemy: inkjet printers
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I bound a little copy of The Witch's Cat by Champagne / @temporalreplicsimile! The story was the perfect opportunity to try my first buttonhole binding and I love the result. It's such a fun structure!
This bind is probably my best example of "Everything that could go wrong... but it's fine in the end" so far.
For the 2025 Renegade Typesetting Exchange, @tinwhiskerpress made a typeset of my favourite Klapollo fanfiction, Words Come Fluently by ItsyRoyal. It's a music industry AU with tons of social media elements and a healthy dose of the secret/mistaken identity trope. And finally, here it is, all bound and ready to go on my shelf!
Except it was an adventure and a half to reach this state.
First, my mistake 100%: the typeset was meant to be A5, but I'm out of short grain A4 paper for A5 books (which is a tragedy I need to remedy QUICK), so I did an A6 book. The size of the font made it work, I was happy with it.
For some reason, my printer skewed the print. It wouldn't have been such a big problem in A5, but it became visible in A6. Printer, why?!
Then, I didn't stabilise my guillotine before cutting. Again, 100% my mistake. But my text block ended up cut even more askew. At this point, I was left with the painful question:
DO I GO ON, DO IT START OVER, DO I GIVE UP?
I'm not a quitter. I have limited amounts of paper. I decided to go on.
After re-trimming, the text block straightened a little, and I figured having a straight book cover might help compensate.
It did! Mostly.
Except. Since it was an AU centred on the fame of the Gavinners, I wanted a cover that would be glittery, flashy. I used a paper with lots, LOTS of glitter for endpages and I layered it on the cover with a cut-up bookcloth that shines a nice gold shifting into purple. It felt like the perfect fit, right?
Except: the paper was too thin, the glue sipped through, the bookcloth got stained. BADLY stained. I tried to salvage it by adding "grunge like" dots of gold.
This was NOT working. This was awful. I was so unhappy with it.
Still not a quitter, but I had other types of bookcloth. And most of all, I had a piece of fabric I'd been meaning to use for forever: shiny, thick, HOLO. (I have told you I love holo, right? Yeah, thought so.)
Scrap the cover, cut the endpages, tidy the text block, let's do it again.
(It's always a little painful)
I printed and glued new endpages. What I had NOT anticipated: the cloth I picked was heavier than I thought. Like, really heavy. And the end pages were too thin.
It tore.
Sunk cost fallacy at this point. I had a nice shiny cover, a perfectly decent text block. I wouldn't let endpages get me down.
I had some decorated paper, thicker than I usually use for endpages, but thought it might be the occasion. It took... a lot of glue. And possibly a bit of tape. I'm not 100% proud. BUT. It holds.
Finally, I managed to complete the bind with adhesive vynil cut with my Silhouette Cameo. And this, for once, worked exactly as intended.
So, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Multiple times. But I'm glad I can finally have this book on my shelf! Thanks for the typeset, @tinwhiskerpress, and thanks for the fic, Itsy!
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It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
The next morning came. And a few more people signed up. I tentatively suggested that if anyone wanted to include a card or note and maybe some stickers for her wife and their kiddo L, it would be welcome. And people started asking me questions. Like, what fic does she like best? Where should we start? Can we make a care package? What does her wife need?
Knowing the people in the server, and their general kindness and enthusiasm, I should not have been surprised, I really shouldn't. It just hits differently when you're the one who's the recipient, you know? "I don't know why you're surprised," said another friend. "You asked us to help and we're helping!" And it wasn't an official guild project, just an incredible act of community and compassion. And immense enthusiasm and zero restraint.
I started asking some surreptitious questions of Zulu and Bell. I'd asked Zulu a few weeks before about granting blanket permission for anyone to bind her fic, and for the typesets to be shared. I casually said, "Sooo I mentioned this to the fanbinding group. If someone does want to send you something, can I share your address? And can I suggest they send cards/stickers to L?" (Yes, and yes.)
We started a separate thread in the Discord server to keep up with the planning. Some collaborations started to come up. I'll typeset from South Africa or southeast Asia or from next door in the next US state, you print and bind, we'll collect some of the American books for a mass mailing to Canada. I don't have time to bind, but I can contribute to shipping costs. I don't know that fandom, but I can take your typeset, and make a copy. I love that fandom but don't have time and materials, but I'll typeset if you bind. At this point, there were more than thirty people involved. New-old fandoms were discovered. Techniques and experiments grew.
I told Bell a little bit. She knew there were books coming. I didn't let her know the full scope, but I figured she could use something good to look forward to. Zulu said one of her goals was to finish all her WIPs before she died. (That hurt my heart. She almost made it! But even at the end, she got distracted by a new fic idea...)
The behind the scenes binding continued. There was negotiating over obscure fandoms, and exclamations over fic for niche favourites. A need for a great deal of baseball theming because Zulu wrote a LOT of ALOTO fic in the last few years. There were anthologies and pamphlets, and tiny books, and large chonks, and an entire collection of every drabble Zulu ever wrote in House fandom.
There was a 100-word hockey RPF drabble bound in a one-page folio with metallic foil details. There was a whole-fandom slipcased pamphlet set of her handful of Friday Night Lights fic. There were Buffy and X-Files fic unearthed from deep in her backlist. There were several bonkers-ambitious binds of her SMAUs, social media AUs of tweets and screenshots that had me throw up my hands and exclaim "how am I supposed to typeset this?"
There were obscure Canadian fandoms encased in the fanciest of marbled paper pamphlets, and a House fic about stolen lunches bound in a brown paper bag. A flower-titled ALOTO fic with a cover patterned like a seed packet. A Yuletide obscure movie fic in silk moire. Firefly fic with a marbled paper inset, and a Stargate Atlantis fic with a vellum dustcover. A crackfic five things fic with a metallic paper DVD on the cover as a Chinese stab binding, from a fandom that needed MOAR LENS FLARE. ("I am sure you know this, Luna," said the binder working on it, "but Zulu is really fucking funny." Yes, yes she absolutely was.)
I can't name every single book because there were more than FORTY of them, but I love every one of them and the care that went into them.
I told you Renegade goes hard.
We drove to nearby city to see Zulu and Bell in August, 2024. They'd just changed up her pain medication and she was having a good day. We had a good visit. I put the pamphlet fic in her hands myself. They'd told her in June that she should expect about a year at most. It would only be three months. That was the last time I saw her in person.
We moved up the projected mailing date from mid-October to mid-September.
We knew, over the September long weekend, when the group chat went quiet, that it wasn't a good sign. I'd kept up a steady stream of pet pictures and other small bits of news. As the summer ended, we had fewer responses from her, and were more likely to just get an emoji back. Morning glory flowers only bloom for a day, and they were blooming outside my back door. I started sending a picture of that morning's flowers to the group chat each day. (And cat pictures. Of course.) I don't know if anyone but me really cared about the morning glories, but it felt like something tangible to hold onto.
The first few envelopes and boxes started to arrive. There were cards and stickers and handknit slippers, and a science facts zine just for L. I told Bell, tell Zulu we love her. And that I'm not sorry I unleashed 30+ fanbinders on her AO3 account.
Bell: (lists off the books that had arrived.)
Me: Oh, so the group shipment from California isn't there yet. Plus at least three other packages I know about.
Bell: Holy shites
Several lovely people found my name in the acknowledgements of more than one fic, and sent me copies, too. (Twenty years in fandom together…) I cried.
We knew things weren't good when Bell emailed to set up a time for a video chat. A few days after the September long weekend, we talked to them face to face, to get the news that they were moving Zulu into hospice care the next day. It would be the last time we'd hear her voice. We knew it was coming, it just all went so much more quickly than expected. She died less than three weeks later.
(But take a look at the dates on the last fic on her AO3 account. In such typical fandom fashion, she was updating her last fic from her hospice bed. A direct quote from Zulu: "The most important thing once I'm there, of course, will be to sort out the wifi situation.")
So, timelines got bumped up by another week. There was a rush for mailing. One international package from Europe got returned to sender without leaving the country due to post office shenanigans, and had to make a return trip, too late for Zulu. The package from Japan made it. The big group shipment box was sent via overnight delivery. It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It showed up on Friday, the day that she died, after she was gone. But by that last week, I'm not sure how much Zulu would have taken in about it, honestly. Bell took it with her to supper that night with friends and family to open as a special treat.
There were more than forty books of all sizes all told, from more than thirty people, and I still have about four more in progress myself right now, though I'll never get to put them in Zulu's hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS…"
But we flooded her with books of her own fic. We deluged her family with her words and love.
The books were on display at her memorial service, along with the quilt that her ALOTO friends had made for her. Also, the jersey she got printed based on her own fic (such a dork, I say with the world's most affection.) The books were all over the front of the room, and it wasn't even all of them. Zulu's mom sent a heartfelt thank you card to be shared with the whole group. The memorial also included earl grey tea and shrimp (two of Zulu's favourites) and a video message recorded to her from one of the actors from A League of Their Own (which I am sure confused many people, but we knew what was up!)
The second group shipment arrived with me several months later, and at least one more book came to me in person at the Renegade retreat, and Bell has them all in a bookcase together. I still have a few more to finish right now.
And, Renegade being Renegade, a couple of people have eyed Zulu's AO3 account and said, "Well, we didn't manage to bind ALL her 350 fic… so far…" And I laughed until I cried, and I am still hugging you all right now Renegade, SO HARD. And you've left a legacy, and you've made a difference. There are no thank you's that are enough. The love is stored in the fanbinds.
I've asked anyone who wants to share what they made to tag it #fanbindsforzulu. If you want to see some amazing things, check out the tag. And if you want to read her fic, and if you want to bind it, she would have loved that, and I would love to see it, too. And tell your friends you love them.
I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!
(which you can listen to here on archive.org)
This is my first time doing a buttonhole stitch binding. Most examples I saw were blank notebooks, and had decorative sheets wrapped fully around the outside of each section of paper, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the text, so I just pasted a thin strip of the marbled paper down to the outer fold edge of each section.
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another bind done! this was a really fun project for @szfiction of her dr. stone ryukasa fic people like you (always want what they can't have). its a faux 3-piece bradel with cutouts well worth the time, made as thanks for zed's endless patience while ive been in accident recovery.
i had such a clear vision for the typeset of this fic as i was reading it, and i really wanted to pull it all the way through the bind. every chapter header (and title and half-title pages) features fragmented portions of winslow homer paintings (one of my faves, most famous for his gorgeous lake/seascapes). the bulk of the fic is from tsukasas POV, but the case and typset are modeled after ryuusui--i really wanted to carry the story's main "theme" of ryuusui gradually engulfing tsukasa's life with, like, comfort so it felt fitting design-wise. the only chapter from ryuusui's pov is one of homer's few "landscape" paintings of mountains to emphasize the contrast :3
and of course if i was going to style a bind after the king of desire himself it had to have a million moving parts and a bunch of decadence. the case itself is 11 pieces and features three different styles of papermaking for the front/back/endpapers alongside a silk moire spine.
i also added hand-sewn endbands (medieval style, with some tension issues but we stay silly), a 4mm silk bookmark, 10k gold clasp, and $100 bill charm--and speckled edges with three shades of hand-mixed paint. i experimented a bit with gold HTF but ultimately settled back on ol' faithful and the titling is all gold metallic HTV
overall, im really happy with this bind and i had a wonderful time making it for such a lovely friend. merry christmas, happy new year, and happy (almost) birthday!!
Every year I put down "any anime" on my list of what I'll bind for the Renegade exchange - I'm not quite brave enough to go fully fandom blind but anime is a big umbrella. This year I ended up with an anime I followed ages ago but hadn't thought much about in years: Bleach.
Cat Scratch Fever takes place well post-canon and one of the defining details is Ichigo learning from Yoruichi the secrets of becoming a cat. He then spends a good bit of the plot as a big orange cat.
Orange cat transformation? I can do that.
I went looking for an orange cat fur print paper out there and came up entirely dry, so instead I went hunting for painting tutorials. With the right acrylics and the right brush shape, the pattern wasn't too bad!
Then I needed to figure out the measurements for the transition - I'm finding I really do enjoy the intricate cloth/paper pattern process, as much as I complain. The hatched paper strips on the right-hand picture were me visualizing the spacing.
This is a layout check of the strips - I later decided I wanted to mix the pattern up more - and the measurements transferred to the bookboard so I could glue down the cloth strips. The bookboard used here is reclaimed from commercial books (bought cheap on the last day of the library sale - I snap up fad diet books and get-rich-quick books that nobody wants and recycle the boards and headbands)
The cover was assembled as a 3-part bradel case so I wouldn't have to worry about making the cloth continuous across the spine - it's its own piece and I could run the paper right up to it.
The left picture is getting ready for a fit check before I put the title on the spine and glued it together. The right is checking out potential title covers - I waffled about that for way longer than it should have taken.
Meanwhile I printed out and sewed the textblock, glued it, lined the spine (purple paper in the right hand picture), and sewed the endbands. Red and white are nice and traditional. They're probably my best endbands to date, honestly.
And here's the finished book! The endpapers are scrapbooking paper, just an interesting texture. The titles are Cricut holographic vinyl, very shiny.
I'm so proud of how it turned out and I hope my recipient enjoys it!
another bind done! this was a really fun project for @szfiction of her dr. stone ryukasa fic people like you (always want what they can't have). its a faux 3-piece bradel with cutouts well worth the time, made as thanks for zed's endless patience while ive been in accident recovery.
i had such a clear vision for the typeset of this fic as i was reading it, and i really wanted to pull it all the way through the bind. every chapter header (and title and half-title pages) features fragmented portions of winslow homer paintings (one of my faves, most famous for his gorgeous lake/seascapes). the bulk of the fic is from tsukasas POV, but the case and typset are modeled after ryuusui--i really wanted to carry the story's main "theme" of ryuusui gradually engulfing tsukasa's life with, like, comfort so it felt fitting design-wise. the only chapter from ryuusui's pov is one of homer's few "landscape" paintings of mountains to emphasize the contrast :3
and of course if i was going to style a bind after the king of desire himself it had to have a million moving parts and a bunch of decadence. the case itself is 11 pieces and features three different styles of papermaking for the front/back/endpapers alongside a silk moire spine.
i also added hand-sewn endbands (medieval style, with some tension issues but we stay silly), a 4mm silk bookmark, 10k gold clasp, and $100 bill charm--and speckled edges with three shades of hand-mixed paint. i experimented a bit with gold HTF but ultimately settled back on ol' faithful and the titling is all gold metallic HTV
overall, im really happy with this bind and i had a wonderful time making it for such a lovely friend. merry christmas, happy new year, and happy (almost) birthday!!
Binding my own work, for once (starting a series!)
So far, I have bound comparatively little of my own work (x, x, x, x), and half the time when I have it's been because someone else asked for it or somebody made cool art. But as my writing productivity has slowed to a crawl (at best), I can admit that the grand majority of what I've written is not going to get added to, and therefore I can bind it without worry.
And suddenly I had a vision. After so many years of Obiyuki AU bingo summers and my own occasional wild ideas, I have a lot of sci-fi AUs built up.
Guess it's time to put those into a book, and oh wait I have the perfect fabric for it. I saw this in the store about a year ago, went "I need this but I have no idea why," then rolled it up and put it away for the right moment.
I mean just look at that. If that isn't sci-fi AU compilation, I don't know what is.
Unfortunately I didn't have enough of it to do a full cover, so I had to settle for the spine and corners. The picture above is measuring out how big the corners should look. The two cardboard pieces are my 5/8" spacers that I use for figuring out how much overhang a cover should have over the bookboard. They come in useful for other things as well, as you see here.
I ended up having ten stories to go in there (AUs: Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, time travel, video game isekai, Destiny, Doctor Who, Warehouse 13, Dune, and Barsoom) and it's a very satisfying book size.
The endpapers are scrapbook paper again, in a distressed Mars-ish print.
And because I was having fun with this book of my own writing that I was binding for myself, I made the spine title glittery.
Now that I've completed this one, I've decided I'm going to do the same with more of my work. I seem to have sorted it into four more genre books, so expect those in the future - I'm planning on binding them all as half bindings with patterned fabric and corners so they look coordinated even if they're not going to come close to matching. It should be fun! (next up: Fantasy?)
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Ever since I started binding books, I have gotten a little predictable with birthday presents. This year was a milestone birthday for a friend who'd written an epic I'd been looking forward to binding and finally decided my skills and tools were ready. I'm still leery of curved spines but I'm getting better at them bit by bit.
The initiating story, The Watchtower, has a definite note of The Yellow Wallpaper to its plot, so the moment I saw this yellow-orange moire bookcloth, I knew it was meant to be.
The book consists of a short story, a chaptered story, and then a collection of short stories. The structure made it a bit interesting to separate. As I am now (as of this book) in possession of a color laser printer, I also included art that the author had linked. There was quite a bit of it!
Included are a couple of pictures from the assembly of the text block - one from punching the holes (this is done with an awl for each signature individually) and one from the middle of sewing (using the punched holes - the linen tapes help support the signatures).
The endpapers are a marbled paper I don't have any particular information on, but they suited the traditional look I was after.
So happy birthday @bubblesthemonsterartist! I need to make myself a second copy of this book because it's absolutely one of the nicest ones I've made to date.
This book, the work of several years by @traditional-with-a-twist, was a reward for their having won the kitty in Obiyuki Madness a couple of years ago. I was happy to hold off until they finished.
But then I couldn't decide what to do with the cover, and since I was making two copies, I figured I'd try new things. 1) a new bookcloth I hadn't tried before, and 2) a half binding with corners.
Well, the new bookcloth tried to kill me. The iron-on vinyl just would not stick - I had to re-cut letters several times (this was my replacing the e, and I think I got it lined up pretty well!) and gave up on half the flower design. The purple is a pretty color, but it is not high on my list of materials I want to work with again.
The half binding with corners was fun, actually - I got to math at it. The underlying board is salvaged from unwanted library booksale books - I figured out the scale of what I wanted the corners to look like directly on the boards. The paper to the right helped me figure out the finished size of the corner pieces (shown cut) and then worked as a template so I could get them applied evenly. The paper (right-hand picture) has to have some overlap, so I could get that sized against the boards too.
The interior has more embellishment than I usually manage to put - there are multiple stories as part of the series, some with chapters (and one brief play!)
These were two books from my 2025 Binderary which I'm happy to have gifted to the author.
annaxmalina
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
areudirty
