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.
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The good news is that it was much easier than I was expecting. So if you know how to make a regular cover, you'll be able to do this one 🙌
For the closure, I used a snap closure button of an old file folder and glued it with hot glue - I've tried super glue and uhu glue as well but it didn't work.
I've also added some inserts just for fun. 🫶
You can read the fic on AO3:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
ficbinding archive: master of the universe / fifty shades of grey
the story:
Master of the Universe by SnowQueens Icedragon (2009)
published as Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James (2011)
an early-state printing of the original Writers Coffee Shop edition, likely second or third state due to the presence of the roman numeral I along the spine. FSOG was eventually acquired and republished by Vintage Books, Bloom Books, and Random House. Hardcover editions were released in the UK by Century in 2012 in a signed limited-edition run. the original release of FSOG was on kindle and is believed to have contributed to the widespread adoption of the e-reader as a device.
archive notes:
fan-created cover page from the archive on Perusing the Shelves
fifty shades of grey: the reddit origins essay (Fanlore)
Fifty shades of exploitation: Fan labor and Fifty Shades of Grey (Journal of Transformative Works)
this bind includes only the seventy chapters that approximate the first book in the fifty shades trilogy
Fated Mates S03.03: Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James: Romance Has Gotten Hotter And I Think I Like It
the binding:
rounded and backed casebinding (adapted/faux three-piece bradel binding with french groove)
oxford hollow spine
printed on churchpaper 24# warm white ("bookbinder's special")
made endbands
dubletta bookcloth
all interior text is rendered in Alegreya
there is a palimpsest on each chapter heading (and on the front cover) calling back to the original twilight fandom
the cover design is to reference the new kind of cover--the object cover--ushered in by the print publication of FSOG. for a time after initial publication, certain sub-genres of romance would utilize an object on the cover, often denoting erotica or BDSM-adjacent plots.
Measures and base design for the cover done, next thing to do will be to let it sit overnight, all the pages under weight so they're pressed the next day.
I'll keep the finished design for myself until the day I finish this 👀
Tomorrow will be stitching day and first layer of glue on the spine + hopefully finishing the cover
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Evening Empire by fluorescentgrey / @yeats-infection (bound with permission)
FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH – FLIGHT OF DEATH –
Remus pulled the printout from the machine. Lily was leaning over his shoulder with a joint.
When I first learned that books used to be sold with pages uncut, leaving readers to slice them open with a knife and creating the deckle edges you see in many books, I immediately thought how exciting it would be to have a horror story in this format. It's like a form of personal communication with the story, the cuts getting more and more rushed and haphazard as you reach the climax. I knew there was only one story that could be such a perfect fit, Evening Empire which left me thinking about it and feeling so much dread for days on end.
Video of a page cutting and more details under!
(sorry for my unmoisturized claw hands)
I chose a sharp lime green color for the top edge foil and ribbon to reference Avada Kedavra and the ships' beams. The designs on the cover and end pages are real crop circles found at important places mentioned in the story. The title page image is the infamous "Mowing Devil" from 1678, which honestly shook me when I first saw it. I had a lot of fun picking out the typography too for the various epistolary sections. Spine was shakily hand-painted. This was my first sextodecimo book format, and I love it for one shots! It's really the perfect size to throw into any bag and have a book to read on hand.
I know this is different to what I normally do but I’ve been working on bookbinding, made using bits of old sketchbooks and genuine leather from an unfinished cosplay project (which I first got as scraps from my local belt maker) 
Three books of Jane Austen fanworks that I finished last year. I wanted to create books in the same style that were as similar as possible to signify that they belong with each other. Luckily I had just enough of the bookcloth and paper (print).
A book with vegan baking recipes I made for a friend of mine with leftover bookcloth and gift wrapping paper. A5 landscape format so that it easily lies open.
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This is a fanbinding of The Dwarf Queen, a discworld fanfiction by @sassysnowperson which I loved and want to recommend.
Here's the author's summary:
Carrot is named King. Of the Dwarfs.
He doesn't want to be king. His nomination is really just a nasty case of Ambition and Politics on the part of some upstart dwarfs. Still, he needs to be very careful how he handles this. Accepting the throne means war. Rejecting...probably also means war.
Help comes from an unexpected source when Cheery Littlebottom offers up a unique proposal. If these ambitious dwarfs want a king, then maybe they should be forced to accept a queen, as well.
Their kind-of-fake dating for political reasons develops in a really nice and sweet way, and to me was really romantic and spoke a lot to me, so I decided to go with a full on romance theme visually: red colour and heart cutout on the outside of the book, as something people see at first when looking at them. In the story, that's also kind of the way they present their fake relationship to others.
I chose the marbled paper in the heart because it reminded me of stone, of actual marble, and I wanted to show how their story in this fic is such a deeply dwarfish story (so, a heart of gemstones in a way), even though both Carrot and Cheery are doing "being a dwarf" wrong, in some other dwarves' eyes.
An element of the story that really moved me was the practical way in which they deal with their situation and relationship, while still giving room to their actual feelings. An important part of that was the discworld-dwarfish way they deal with the topic of finances, namely in comparing their ledgers. When handling the book, the closer we get to the story itself, the closer we also get to it visually, so I created a ledger background in LibreOfficeCalc:
I tried finding fonts that were close to what I know from my discworld books, and chose the cursive style because it reminded me of blackboard writing in school, and the importance of written words in discworld dwarf culture. And, of course, footnotes!
And at least, a few WIP pictures:
It was such a fun binding project and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
I'm really proud of how this one has turned up to be, there are some errors but this one has been my best so far.
I already thanked them privately back when I asked them for permission, but I want to thank @carletes for letting me print her amazing fic, bringing it to life, and @afireflakeart for letting me use her stunning art to finish the look of the book!!
It was my first time doing such a big binding project and I can only feel happy about the result.
My latest bookbinding project! (Or one of them tbh, I can't wait to show off several tinier books than this for the @renegadeguild Tiny Book Exchange.
This is my first tête-bêche featuring two classic Smallville fics: @rivkat 's fic Golden Rule paired with @seperis 's companion fic Slipping in Between. I've loved these fics for a while now and I've especially loved listening to dodificus's podific of Golden Rule. Both of the authors had permission statements in their profiles on ao3 and I really wanted to celebrate these two fics in print format. I really love the way that these two fics play off of each other. Golden Rule is excellent all on its own, with Clark's manipulation and the relationship he forges with Lex and SiB is such a great complement to that fic, providing a glimpse into Lex's pov throughout the events of the fic, all leading up to the big decision at the end.
Detail shots and process talk below the cut:
Some typesetting details from the end of SiB. Initially, I was looking for fics that I might be able to bind as my first dos a dos. I am obsessed with the way those look and I'm still on the hunt but I really love the way that the tete-beche allows these two books to be kind of hugged together, two sides of the same coin. I thought that worked so well for these two fics and their different perspectives. The dos a dos didn't pan out with these two because they are very different in length but I'm really happy with the way the format turned out for this book.
The cover features a cut out on both boards for the paper labels and I couldn't resist some gold foil for the spine and accents. I wasn't sure about the two different colors of book cloth for the cover but I love how the overall effect turned out. They look like ever so slightly different books connected by the same shared spine which was absolutely the goal.
Behold my first really successful endbands! This book was supposed to be my first three-piece bradel bind because I wanted to use it as a prototype for one of my TBB books. I ended up make them kind of simultaneously but these were my first set of endbands this go around. Having the right cord and thread really makes a huge difference.
And my house of El colophon! (Which I've actually used for three binds now and only photographed the once). I've had this project in the works for months now, with the pages cut and folded and pressed since at least the beginning of this year if not earlier, hence the 2025 in the text there which was probably accurate when I was typesetting.
Hollanov Fanfiction Binds: Duty of Care & Holding Patterns by boopboop ( @boopifer )
One set made as a trade and the other for me to keep.
Design wise, these are based specifically on a chapter in Duty of Care where Ilya tries to take the blame for breaking Pike’s vase.
This first fic is Ilya getting pieced back together through acts of love by everyone around him. Kintsugi fit thematically and I absolutely love the imagery. The layered HTV is meant to mimic the vase and gold repairs and the dust jacket.
For the second fic, Holding Patterns, I wanted to continue the broken vase theme from the first bind. Except for this time, instead of it (aka Ilya) being mended back together, it’s the final fracturing of Russia. The idea for the artwork comes from a chapter in “Duty of Care” when Ilya takes the Hollanders to Russia to visit the iconic Red Square in Moscow.
This fic made me cry. 😭 it was amazing. I loved it. But wow it’s gets you in the feels.
End-pages are hand marbled, and the photos don’t do justice. I used an iridescent white that makes them sparkle along with the gold paint. For the red pages, I had initially wanted to replace the gold with black, but unfortunately black paint still hates me. Despite that, I’m still very happy with the outcome.
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Alright, I've got the first of many new projects to share today! This is a custom binding of on the same page, a Good Omens human!AU by Chekhov, in which Aziraphale and Crowley are both authors (one of religious literature, the other of smutty romances) who not only write parts of each others' books but also for the duration of the fic are pretending to be married so one of them can land a book deal. There's so much pining, friends. Pining all over the place. I even put pines on the cover.
We have skivertex green faux leather up there on the cover, for the spine and fore edge. I originally intended to do corner caps but I like this look better and it's easier to measure. Lots of long vertical lines. Title is in pewter HTV and no, I still have not learned my lesson about weeding swirly fonts. I will never learn. I wanted it to look like a romance novel with literary pretensions (this is a compliment) and it absolutely does. The tree print is scrapbook paper, though I've forgotten where I bought it. The story is set at a big fancy house in the woods in Vermont, so it's perfect.
Have a look under the cut for more photos!
Photo of the spine, in which the swirly script font persists. I really wanted this book to be a flatback but it had just a bit too much swell, so it got rounded. The bookmark is dark gray, matching the htv, and the endbands are handmade. The leather extends further on one side than the other, I know. We are none of us perfect. It's damn cute though.
The endband colors were chosen to match these endpapers. Funny enough, they were bought for a different story. This fic is set at Christmas time, though it isn't actually about Christmas, so these ones with more of a winter motif were a good fit (better than they would have been for the story I bought them for, which was overtly a Christmas Fic). This theme continues once we get inside.
The title page has a holly frame. The setting is strong in this fic, out in the woods and kind of cozy, so it felt right to use a lot of greenery.
The image on the left up there, with the pinecones, originally had a twee little scene with a horse-drawn carriage in the middle. It was adorable but didn't suit the story, and that frame was too good to pass up, so I edited it out and put this quote from the author's Chapter 1 summary in there. None of the other chapters had the kind of summary that would work for this, but I thought this one worked really well to set the scene, so it's the only one I kept. And we have more holly in the frame around the chapter numbers. I grayed this one out so it wouldn't fight with the text. It was a little dominating when I had it in black. This softened it up. All the images are via rawpixel and in the public domain.
And that's that! The first of many. Hope you liked!
I was asked which tutorials I followed to achieve this look by @0n1ythisandnothingmore, and I figured it might be helpful for others so I’ve compiled a list!
For setup (downloading from Ao3 etc), tools, layout and printing:
For the binding process itself, this tutorial by bitter melon bindery goes over the whole thing step by step:
For the half-bound look (paper and cloth), here’s another video by bitter melon bindery:
When designing my own covers, I figured that I could just print the title onto some pretty scrap paper before I did the cover construction. I used my inkjet printer and it worked out pretty well, though I wish the blacks were deeper. (I found that laser printer toner rubbed off when I tried to burnish over the paper with wax)
For the sewing itself (with tapes), I followed this tutorial by Renaissance Bookbinding:
(He also has a really good video on the ways that little things can compound to make a book look professional, which I found helpful)
Anyway, I hope this helps someone. And of course, I'm happy to answer questions as well! I know how intimidating all of this looks, but it’s not so bad once you work out all the steps. If there is interest, I might make a tutorial at some point for using free programs like LibreOffice and GIMP for doing the layout and cover design.
(P.S. if anyone wants the layouts I did for Reversal and Saint’s Guise, I will see if I can find a way to share them)
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