Towns End Bindery

Alright, there will be more photos but first I have to go on a rant about the lineco oatmeal because it SUCKS. I use their products a lot because they're cheap and accessible and usually I have no issues. This cloth has a different texture than most, I think it was called linen finish? It's toothy, nicely rough in the hands, and visually similar to the Italian book cloth that Hollander's sells. But I can buy this from Blick and not have to pay shipping. Win-win, right? No. Wrong. The Italian is so vastly superior that I won't be buying this again. It's really, really stiff, stiffer than buckram or cardstock or anything else I've used. It frays like a bitch no matter which way you cut it, that's why the ribbons were necessary to hide the seam. When I had to fold the cover back to tuck in the spine turn-in the backing material actually cracked at the hinge. I didn't know that was possible and have certainly never had it happen before. This stuff is awful. Don't bother with it.

Okay. Rant over. Have some more photos:

Spines and endbands! I love to do this trick with the spines, where the title is spread over multiple volumes, but it takes the right kind of title to do it so I don't always get the chance. They're very shiny and didn't want to photograph but they are very pretty in person. And for the endbands I chose double cores that I wove in the aromantic flag pattern. The word "aromantic" doesn't appear in the fic, but the authors did clarify in some of their notes that they intentionally wrote Crowley to be on the aro spectrum and I thought it would be fun to make a direct nod to that. And it became a bit of a recurring motif with...

...the endpapers! These are Renato Crepaldi marbles. Sometimes you have to spring for the good stuff. As soon as I saw them I thought of this bind and the aro flag colors. It would not be inaccurate to say that the rest of the bind was built around them. Aziraphale in this specializes in antique book repair (because of course he does) and a lot of design choices flowed from that. Marbled paper is a highly traditional bookbinding material, and the choice to do corner caps also came from here. You may have noticed that the ribbon bookmark is a deep brown, and that was chosen to match these endpapers even though black would have fit the aro theme better.

Ok, let's get inside:

The title page and the table of contents. Crowley, as it turns out, is sitting on a secret: he used to repair clocks. There's a plot-important grandfather clock in the story, so the title page stems from that. I tend to do very center-oriented title pages so this one was fun. And we have old books again on the contents page. Both images are from rawpixel, and both books have the same graphics.

I was able to retain the authors' chapter summaries this time around. A lot of older books have chapter titles that run on really long, and I thought it would be fun to nod to that here and add to the old world feel. And we have ornaments in the footer! Those are clock hands! Again, from rawpixel. I grabbed them from an ink drawing of a clock face. I also used them for a scene break image, though I didn't take a photo of that. It's like the first page ornaments, but there's no gap between them. It's adorable.

We do have a title on the spine though! That is pewter foil HTV and I thought it would be fun to make it vertical. I have done that a couple of times, but not all titles are suited for it and it doesn't fit the vibe for every fic. Here, however, it echoes some of the choices I made in the typeset, so I seized the opportunity.

Top view, showing off the shiny gray ribbon bookmark and the handmade endbands. The colors really are not shining through; they are chocolate brown and silver-gray stripe. It's a single core, very basic, and that's on purpose. This story is a lot less...frilly? flourish-y? than many others I have bound. I'm not sure those are the right words. It's hard to explain but a more tailored, less elaborate approach just seemed like the right choice. So the endbands are simple, the fonts are sans serif, the cover is less elaborate, and even the corner caps are a simpler design than the other choices I had on hand. It's a nice book, quality materials, feels good in the hand, but you have to meet it where it's at and understand what went into it to appreciate that. Given some of the story's themes I think that's fitting.

Alright, enough philosophy, let's look inside! The endpapers are cardstock, gray with this metallic gold circle overlay. I kind of wish I'd done an in-fill so the turn-in was less obvious under them, but I almost never do those so I didn't think of it till it was too late. It was hard matching anything with the cover material. My endpaper choices tend towards florals, highly-patterned chiyogami, and abstract marbles and none of those felt right, but plain ones would have been too understated. These were the right balance, though in hindsight I do wish they were silver instead of gold. Oh well.

Remember when I said Crowley is a mechanic in this? Yeah. He's dirty and it's hot. So we've got this streaky graphic I found on rawpixel that is probably supposed to be paint but to me looks like oil. I've got the whole thing on the title page and just the top part on the first page of each chapter, so it doesn't obscure the text. I tend to make my chapter headers kind of simple, which is fine but can get a little same-y when you do as many as I have, so I got a very little bit experimental with this one and made them vertical. The vertical spine title is echoing this. Gives the whole thing some cohesion. I love it.

So the very first thing you should do is measure your book and write it down on paper. Make sure you are measuring from different spots, as book binding is a manual process and sometimes the measurement can vary by 1-2mm. Write down the biggest measurement you get

I write down the measurements for the TOP/BOTTOM and SPINE piece, and add ~3-4mm. This is to account for the inside paper lining thickness and bookcloth when you fold it over the edge.

Adding too many extra mm could make the slipcase too loose and your book will slip out very easily, and making it too tight means you can't put the book in without having to use force and risk damaging the book and slipcase. My slipcases do tend to end a wee bit on the snug side, still easy to push in but need to shake a few times to get the book out, so I usually add a ribbon to the case to make it easier to remove the book.

For this book, my measurements are

SPINE: Length: 210mm+3 = 213mm Width: 32mm+3 = 35mm

TOP/BOTTOM: Length: 137mm+3 = 140mm

Width: 35mm, same as the SPINE piece

DAS measures all the pieces at once. For the FRONT and BACK pieces, you'll have to account in the board thickness into the measurement too, so the math is something like

board thickness*2 + SPINE Length

and the width is 140mm (same as TOP/BOTTOM Length)

BUT, I am bad at math. I had to redo the FRONT and BACK pieces for slipcases soooo many times now I just assemble the SPINE - TOP - BOTTOM pieces first, measure the total from there and then cut the FRONT and BACK. If you hate cutting, and you're more confident in your measurement and math you can also cut the front and back piece at this stage

Another important thing to keep in mind is the grain direction of the board, when you're cutting the pieces the grain direction should be running like this:

Once the pieces are cut, I glue them onto the inside paper lining. Make sure that here the grain direction is also running the same as the board pieces:

After that is done and I have cut the pieces from the paper, I start assembling it:

Make sure that the SPINE piece is sandwiched between the TOP/BOTTOM pieces. A cleaner visual of what I mean by that:

I use the following tools to keep boards in place while the glue is drying:

Magnetic corner clamp, 90° Corner clamp with guide grooves Corner clamp, 90°

Once that done, I note down the measurements for the FRONT/BACK pieces:

As I mentioned before, the formula for the FRONT/BACK Length is

board thickness*2 + SPINE Length

my boards are 2.5mm thick my SPINE length is 213mm so that means 2.5mm*2 + 213mm = 218mm (which is also the measurement my ruler is giving me yay me)

the width for the FRONT/BACK is 140mm (same as TOP/BOTTOM Length)

Once again, make sure the grain direction of your board is correct, glue the inside paper lining to the board

aaaand it's assmebling time!

I like to use my 3kg coin box as a weight for pressing the board pieces down lmfao

After the glue is dry, your slipcase should look like this:

I chose a half-bound style with book cloth and paper, though I burnished the paper parts with wax to add a moisture barrier. Hopefully that helps the covers last a good long while.

The casing-in went mostly according to plan. Reversal was very well-behaved, but I botched Saint’s Guise a little (next image) by attaching the end paper of the cover too far forward. I have to decide if that’s gonna bother me enough that it will be worth cutting the book out and re-casing it with new end papers :/

I wanted these to feel like a matched set, so they have coordinating bookmarks and endpapers. I used flower symbology here — poppies on Reversal for remembrance and honoring the dead (plus, the Doc is a war vet so it made sense). White Cosmos on Saint’s Guise for faithfulness and to serve as a bridge between life and death.

I also added in a bunch of artwork!! As much as I could fit. Look at this pretty by @dogerbooger ^_^

I have known of the 'and the goddess said let there be chaos' SBI series ever since the height of the Dream SMP. In fact, I made my very first ficbind ever in 2023 for this series, although the result was never documented on this blog.

Nevertheless, I wanted to revisit this fic series where Philza becomes a dad to the fae. The descriptions of magic and forestry made for a vivid visual and I sought to achieve that look by finding the most vivid color image for the cover. Magic in the fic series has an oily, colorful, and cloying vibe - the same vibe as with the image I found for said cover.

As for the pages, I wanted the paper, text, and decorations to feel like old woodblock prints to present a medieval vibe, as if Philza himself wrote down the letters, cut up the pages, and pressed woodblocks in ink to bedight what he wrote down. I looked through literal hundreds of patterns, designs, images, and templates to find the ones that fit this theme and will often delete previous designs if I found a better one.

This took me to go on-and-off with this project for weeks and months at a time as I completed other binds or embark on new projects.

The very text too was something I was particular about. There were parts such as the fic summaries that I wanted to look as if Philza himself handwrote the letters. There were other parts where I want the letters to look lush and beautiful (see the drop caps). I also want to preserve the fic metadata and make them fit into the medieval aesthetic, which meant using a different font instead of the main text font.

It took a lot of trial and error but in the end, I managed to find the right combination of text fonts and styles to make them all flow together.

I also wanted to carry over something I did from my 2023 bind - a collage of leaves, branches, and stems that I used to decorate my very first bookbind. I wanted to bring them into this book as a reminder of how far I have come in my bookbinding skills, and how much this fic series meant to be back then.

All in all, this entire book project from beginning to end took 1 year, 9 months, and 21 days. There were a lot of mistakes and corrections I made along the way, but now, at least, one of the longest projects I have ever undertaken is finally complete!

Special thanks to itsultraviolet for writing this fic series!