Towns End Bindery

I'm a designer and I love books so, with permission, I decided to try binding one of my favorite fanfics into a book for the first time!

Download the files here!

376,776 words / 880 pages across 2 volumes

this is a free fanwork of @99corentine's Skyrim fanfic GOL HAH DOV; read it here! please do not re-upload, repurpose or rewrite the story without express permission from the author.

the design is @thetempleofmara's original book design that you can check out here! + process! I'm still blown away by how much time and creativity went into this.

none of the content of this book - writing, illustrations, cover, font choice, etc - is mine, except for the colophon.

feel free to use this to make your own physical copy of GHD, but for personal use only. TODD PLEASE DON'T SUE ME

I think of this as a 2nd edition, because while I adore mara's design, I did my own typeset and wanted to try adding a few new features and extras, such as:

optimizing for a physical print

table of contents

glossary

colophon

running chapter titles

recs of other works by corentine!

If you’re an anti I feel bad for you — you dont even know the depths of the character growth you’re missing out on experiencing 😔 don’t worry — it’ll wait for you to be ready 😌

I rebound a 1981 Italian edition of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco in red leather for @erebus0dora

📚 The calfskin cover features a debossed and foiled library floor plan, with two pieces of leather mosaic marking the entrance hall and the inner sanctum. Title tooled on the spice with actual real bronze tools.

📚 Edges painted in red and endbands embroidered by hand.

📚 Cloth-hinged endpapers in gold moire paper, with the original endpapers with the map of the abbey were preserved as a separate signature at the front of the book.

Sometimes you plan for a lot to happen, and sometimes your workplace throws everything up in the air and screws over your entire bookbinding hobby for the foreseeable future.

But that did not stop me from enjoying Project Hail Mary, looking up the Goslingverse crossovers, and stumbling across this fic from Twitter user tunariceball, who made a wonderful fic about Courtland and Grace meeting each other in prison. The fic also inspired @chicharonie22 to make a fanart of the meeting that I had to include!

I haven't made a simple pamphlet bind in so long, yet I found myself enjoying my time weaving the pages and gluing the front/back cover strips. Such a simple bind, yet such a perfect form for short fics! Perhaps I can make more of these to tide myself over till I have some more free time.

Just finished these Warriors Ominibus rebinds, this time with painted edges! These aren’t perfect, as you can see, since I didn’t sand the pages to be more uniform. I have found that once you start sanding, no matter how low you continue the grit, it always adds some texture that makes airbrushing a little more patchy. I avoid it unless I have no choice. You can see where each book starts and ends with these, especially with them painted, but personally I don’t mind that. This is a pretty simple stencil - if I do it again I want to make the symbols smaller, and stretch out a little farther.

A while ago, I did pretty much the ENITRE series like this for custom order for someone (thx for trusting me, Trevor!) It was super challenging, but also a lot of fun. It was crazy expensive, since there were so many rebinds (I think it was 16 or 18) - so it isn’t something I am sure will ever be asked of me again. I really really enjoyed the project either way, so I am so happy I was able to complete it!

@madelineshrimp has done a gorgeous job! The book is so beautifully made, with loving details and a great cover (using the illustrations by @sunshine-dies ).

Madelineshrimp has allowed me to share the pics they sent me!

my childhood entry into fantasy and inspiration to start writing was cornelia funke's inkheart, which stars a precocious young girl and her father who travels around repairing old and special books. it was also my introduction to bookbinding in general—and i don't do repairs like mo but i do know a thing or two now.

my copy from childhood got beat to shit—i lent it out to a friend who did not read it and let it get all fucked up, yes, BUT ALSO i read it so much that the spine was cracked pretty badly in a few places and beginning to twist.

so. repair time! i sanded down the spine, and started doing what i could. unfortunately mass market paperbacks like this can't really have their spines repaired short of removing ALL the glue and redoing the binding, which i wasn't about to do, so i. tried my best to reset it with an iron and a very stupid weight situation

not fixed, but it wasn't twisting anymore, and the slant was a lot less pronounced. you'll have to take my word for it.

for the binding itself—there's a book within the book also called inkheart, rebound in green linen to look unremarkable, so i did what i could :) i didn't want all the iconic red to disappear (it's what i HATE about the new editions) so it's immortalized in this pretty marbled end paper. the book also mentions a red bookmark so i took the original spine and glued it to some scraps from the end pages.

the crack in the spine isn't QUITE fixed but having a proper cover will help minimize any further split down the line. i also left in all of baby me's bookmarks...i don't know what she was thinking for a few of these but i'm sure it was important enough to leave.

now it can look unobtrusive on my shelf too, lest anyone accidentally read their beloved wife into a grim fantasy tale <3

A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell

The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words

A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.

Tuesday's Gone With the Wind by @thisapplepielife

More pics below ✨️

This book has reached its recipient, so I can share pictures now! This is Deadset by @pbaintthetb, an amazing Nie Huaisang fic in which Nie Huaisang is murdered and becomes a tgcf-style ghost.

I did a kintsugi-look binding for a different calamity au (ironically, one in which Jin Guangyao was the ghost) but spoilers, this was the fic that I first thought of using it for. And while my first attempt was just a surface design on the cover, I built this into the structure of the book itself. The cover structure is inspired by Ben Elbel's "pixel binding" which is a book cover made of many tiny squares; using irregular pieces here makes it not quite as flexible, but I'm still very happy with the effect.

The individual sections of the cover were glued to a thin, flexible paper, then covered with a decorative paper that I worked down into the spaces between (definitely use paste rather than pva for this). The gold is deco foil, often called toner-reactive foil but it adheres to dry pva as well, so I simply filled the channels with pva and then applied the foil using the head of a pin to apply pressure (you don't need heat when applying it to pva).

For the rounded spine, I used leather pieces so that I could still have the thickness but they would be flexible enough that I wouldn't have to sacrifice the irregular shapes.