A collection of hand bound books created by ML Townsend of Towns End Bindery (@towns_end_bindery on Instagram). I also reblog books I think are pretty.
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.
I really wanted to use the nature magazine font (Harding) but I have not been able to locate a copy of that font file anywhere, so I used Marcellus (from google fonts) which is a little bit similar.
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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!
My commissions are officially open! For this batch I’ll work trough the summer and eventually fall! Feel free to send a email to look at the eventual cost. All works are fully custom and made by hand with real hand tooling.
Claud Monet and Vincent Van Gogh paintings are featured in the end papers of these quarto journals. Each has a ribbon bookmark, but if you attend The Obscure Summer Solstice Night Market on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, you could purchase these with a matching reading bookmark. Check The Obscure’s link https://sevn.ly/xVVlvp4h for RSVP info.
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All Might discovers a young Izuku Midoriya in AFO's base and ends up with custody of the young boy upon rescuing him. Izuku hides his quirk in fear that he would be perceived as villainous and makes friends along his journey to become a hero. All Might does his best to raise a child and learns what it means to be a great dad.
ABOUT THE BOOK
FORMAT: Letter folio, flatback casebinding, french link stitch, no tapes
FONTS: Helvetica Now Display (used for comic page numbers), EB Garamond, Noto Serif JP (both used in frontmatter and backmatter with AO3 and author info.)
MATERIALS: 140gsm/37lb inkjet Double Sided Brochure Paper Glossy (8.5"x11"), 80pt binder's board (~2mm), 30/3 size waxed linen thread, yellow and light blue cardstock, Verona bookcloth: Hot Toffee, We R Memory Keepers Foil Pen with gold foil.
PROGRAMS USED: Affinity Publisher, Bookbinder-JS
TIMELINE OF SHAME:
Retrieved from AO3, and typeset: April 8-13, 2025.
Printed and bound: October 3-4, 2025.
Cover decorated, and posted to Tumblr: July 1, 2026.
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I love Dad!Might, and I adore Crude's art! So pretty! So dynamic! Basically, I am one with the heart-eyes emoji, and the heart-eyes emoji is me.
I bound this comic while attending an outdoor event. A family member was getting an award, so I came along to support/celebrate. I needed something to keep myself sufficiently occupied without being anti-social, so binding a book it was!
It had been a while since I'd bound anything, and HERO! was both something I really enjoyed and wanted to keep, and also short enough to hopefully kickstart myself back into Making Things.
Regarding the typeset: Page numbers were added to the comic. Found a font that fit the vibe, then added a polygon with a slight gradient and outline to ground it on the page. Backmatter includes links and QR codes to the story on Tumblr and Twitter, and to the author/artist's carrd, as well as the usual page with all of the AO3 information.
Regarding the imposition: For the first time, I used the PDF Markup setting to add marks for sewing. Very handy. It made punching the holes quick and easy — no thought, measurements, or punching templetes/jigs required. Something that was much appreciated for this bind-it-on-the-go project.
Regarding the printing: Wrangling the printer took a while (and quite a few test prints), but the glossy inkjet paper worked great! To balance quality and expediency, I printed on 'Better' quality instead of 'Best'. This meant the subtle background hatching details were lost in the printing, coming out solid black.
Regarding the decoration: I chose yellow endpapers and spine for All Might, and based the light blue covers and foil design off of the blue All Might t-shirt.
Took such a long time to get around to finishing the bind. I didn't take the hot foil pen with me that day, then in the intervening time it was lost in the shuffle of reorganizing the craft room and workshop. We're currently going through a heatwave, so, overheated and at loose ends, I sought refuge in the cool basement for a few hours. Foil pen: found; Cover: completed; creative malaise: conquered. I have Made A Thing!
Are you all ready for this? This is maybe the prettiest book in the entire batch of 12. I've made some damn pretty books but this one? Oh my god. Look:
This is Innocuous by flamethrower and it is a canon-compliant, post-s1 Good Omens fic from 2019. Without getting too spoilery, Heaven and Hell are getting up to mischief again and our favorite pair are not nearly as at-liberty as they think. They have to think their way out of a trap that they don't even realize at first that they're in.
Alright, for cover materials we have lineco tan book cloth on the spine, textured turquoise cardstock for the base, chiyogami with a floral mosaic pattern for the ornamental parts, and gold foil HTV for the title. I included two photos to show off how shiny it is. The chiyogami is actually a couple of scraps from way back when I bound The Rose and the Serpent back in 2024. I used it for the endpapers in that one and this is nearly every bit of what was left. There's more on the back, so have a look under the cut!
This is the back. It was a painstaking process to cut this out with a fine-bladed xacto knife but it was worth every second. The scraps I had were identical, but it was really important to me that the front and back were not the same, and this is what I landed on. The cover (and the endpapers too, when we get to those) were inspired by a scene later in the fic when Crowley is showing off a rooftop garden paradise that he's made. This seemed like the kind of cool, lush, luxurious thing he might have in there. And I have to say it exceeded my wildest expectations. I didn't know I had it in me to make this.
And then the HTV got warped going onto the spine and I ended up with a wonky "o". We must remain humble. It's honestly still lovely though, I forgot it was there until I started writing up this post. I got a very good round on this text block, almost no swell (even after rounding, my books often have some swell, though it's only noticeable when I stack them). And the endbands came out unusually well. Those are, as always, custom made. They look good with the cover, though they were designed to match the endpapers:
These are that thick soft artisan paper that Joanne's used to sell. The gold bits are shiny foil. Again, secret rooftop Eden luxury vibe here. I have no regrets about this bind, though if I had it to do over again I might choose a solid color instead of a pattern here. Maybe. Maybe not. On the one hand I really like the pattern but on the other it is kind of a lot with the cover.
Couple of quick shots of the interior. I kept it a bit simple, honestly, which makes a nice contrast with the cover. That wasn't intentional but I can't say it doesn't fit. Feels balanced. Let's see, what else? There are, I kid you not, over 450 footnotes in this fic and those took some wrangling to get in line. I think that's the most footnotes I've ever dealt with in one story. Oh, and there's an extra chapter at the end which is a deleted scene that I had to track down on the author's other fanfic account (listed in the notes at the top of the fic) because they'd removed it from Ao3. It's public, it just needed a bit of extra leg work.
And there we have it! This was one of the earliest long fics I ever read and it is really pleasing to give it the fanbinding treatment. It was interesting rereading it after several years and seeing how trends had shifted in things like characterization and the types of plots chosen. I'm not sure if that's a wider fandom trend or a shift in my reading taste or both. Gave me some perspective, anyway.
First attempt at Back and Forth From New York by alphalupi. I alternated the social media fic chapters to read along, and vellum overlays for the multiple image instagram posts. I'll have to give it another go, apparently I can't use a ruler and the covers are off-centre
Much Ado About Chickens (or "With This Chicken I Thee Wed") by Silvarbelle
Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Category: M/M
Words: 4,189
What the CLUCK? Wei Wuxian has the sense of clucky mutterings with every gift and kindness his Lan Zhan gives him, beginning with Unexpected Proposal Chickens.
and it's fanart comic With this chicken I thee wed!!! by @pakhnokh
This was a fun little story! Gotta love the scene with the roosters — the joke writes itself, and Silvarbelle's delivery is fun:
"With his hands full of cock, Wei Wuxian wondered if his beloved Lan Zhan had finally flown his own mental coop."
Pakhnokh's comic is also beautiful, and I absolutely had to include it!
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ABOUT THE BOOK
FORMAT: Perfect binding, trimmed to 5 7/8" x 4 1/4"
FONTS: Palatino Linotype, Rosarivo [Google Fonts]
IMAGES: Painting of a chicken [Pinterest], Painting of lotus seed pods by Qin Tianzhu [Pinterest], Lotus Home For A Little Mouse by Violetta Boyadzhieva [Pinterest]
MATERIALS: 20lb Domtar EarthChoice Multipurpose Colour Copy Paper (cream), 20lb Hammermill Premium Laser Gloss Paper for Coloue (94 bright), cardstock
The decision to use glue and make it into a perfect bound book, instead of a sewn binding, came later in the process. The typeset was made with sewn signatures in mind, so I ended up making 3 separate documents for this fic:
Everything before the comic. I finagled the document so that there would not be random blank pages before the comic.
The comic. Printed on glossy paper for laser printers. The resulting colour was a little lacking compared to if I'd used my inkjet, but there was no ghosting from the other side of the page!
The backmatter. Here, I included links and QR codes to souces, the materials list, and the information from AO3.
Regarding the binding:
This was also my second try at both perfect bound style binding and at making a paperback. I was more liberal with the glue, and pasted down the cover 1/4" onto the endpaper, instead of 1/8" as previous. Definitely more secure!
Regarding the cover:
For the cover design, I went with roosters and lotus pods, from the first and third scenes. I raided Pinterest for the images, which is absolutely terrible for sources. As far as I can figure, the lotus pods on the front are by Qin Tianzhu, and the back cover artwork is by Violetta Boyadzhieva.
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In anticipation of the upcoming Stray Kids concert (last June. It is now July 2026. This has been sitting in my drafts for over a year), I made a mini lyrics book!
The lyrics to the 'ATE', 'HOP', and 'Mixtape: dominATE' albums are printed in 3pt font onto 120 pages (1 sheet of paper exactly, using the Mini layout). The fun thing about minis is finally finding a use for hoarded scraps! Cover decorations drawn onto the completed book with acrylic paint pens. Not pictured here, but there's also a small jump ring coming out at the head, so the book can be attached to something/worn. #BananagramsForScale
Format: Mini (from Bookbinder-JS's Whacky Small Layouts)
Fonts: Noto Sans KR, Mandhor
Materials: scraps of decorative cardstock from Michaels and Dollarama, cardboard from a box of crackers, a tiny red jump-ring leftover from my forays into chainmaille, acrylic paint pens, 30/3 size waxed linen thread
Programs: Affinity Publisher V2, Bookbinder-JS
TIMELINE OF SHAME:
Typeset: May 2025.
Bound: May 6 - June 18, 2025.
Tumblr post draft created: May 7, 2025.
Concert: June 29, 2025.
Posted to Tumblr: July 1, 2026.
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Actually, I made two (2) tiny books. This project was intended to be many editions made as freebies for the concert, but I severely underestimated how much time it would take. So now I have a pair of charms or earrings. Mini books are so much more difficult to work with than regular folio or quartos, wow! Printer skew is deadly — when you're working with something so small, even 2mm is huge! And so much less wiggle room for clumsiness.
Because I typeset it with the idea of giving these mini books away to other fans at the concert, I included a little message on the frontmatter page:
STRAY KIDS DOMINATE LYRICS BOOK
This book was made with love for the show
At the Rogers Stadium in Toronto on June 29, wishing
You: A Tremendous Evening!
The first letter of each line spells out 'stay', which is the name of Stray Kids' fanbase. The first letters of the wish at the end, the last three words, spells out 'ate', referring to Stray Kids' extended play ATE (2024), single-album Mixtape: dominATE (2025), and thedominATE World Tour (2024-2025).
Уже пробовал печатать и делать мягкий переплет для некоторых книг, в основном в формате А6. Теперь же решил научиться делать твердый переплет, выбрал для этого учебник на 200 страниц, формат страниц А5. А в качестве материала обложки – ткань перкаль и переплетный картон.
Проклеивал всё столярным клеем ПВА. Ткань перед приклеиванием к картону проклеил с помощью бумаги (получился такой трёхслойный материал – ткань, бумага, картон). Кисть слегка мочил в воде, чтобы легче было тонким слоем наносить клей.
Проклеивание ткани бумагой далось очень нелегко, но это того стоило – результат получился очень приятный на ощупь. На третью попытку это ощущалось как мучения, но потом было очень приятно собирать обложку.
Для прошивки блока использовал капроновые белые нитки, прошивал сам блок на три киперные ленты (10мм).
Потом корешок книжного блока "армировал" той же тканью, из которой делал обложку. И перед этим приклеил закладку ляссе из атласной ленты.
Печаталось всё на обычном недорогом лазерном принтере (тут важно соблюсти порядок страниц, чтобы получилось правильные тетрадки, в моем случае по 16 страниц).
А надпись на обложку переносил с помощью проектора и карандаша. Очень странный, но очень рабочий метод, хаха. А потом закрашивал акриловым маркером.
Если кто-то хочет поделиться своим опытом, то буду рад почитать в комментариях. Ещё больше фотографий прилагаю ниже:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Please feast your eyes on the work of my very good and talented friend @boltlightning, who surprised me by turning my Dorian in DA2 long-fic into a real live physical book!
Because bolt is a bookbinding genius, it includes so many cool details... It's stamped with the Kirkwall seal! Stitched with a peacock-blue headband! And peacock-inspired endpaper! And subtle Hawke-red accents in the design!
...And a stupid title I sure didn't picture in elegant print when I chose it for a laugh! But look how beautiful it looks now. (bolt even legitimized my stupidity by adding the canon banter as a lovely epigraph! How perfect is that?)
Also: My overthought new translations and food lore incorporated as footnotes and appendices! Now that's a true friend who listens to my brainrot. (please don't encourage me, bolt)
And finally: This beautiful art I commissioned from @the-upper-shelf with Hawke and Dorian in Kirkwall-non-mage disguise, placed as the endpiece to the epilogue ♥♥♥ IT LOOKS SO GOOD.
(feat. me awkwardly obscuring spoilers for the 2 remaining people out there who might still be interested in many thousands of words about Andraste's most niche ship)
I can't quite describe the feeling of carting a hefty block of my own words around the house, but I couldn't be happier. 10/10. Recommend realizing your creative work in physical form so you can cradle it like a baby. Thank you, bolt, you are a genius.
