Working on it

I’m serious.

using a knife

to threaten a cook

not the shar

Like Pride and Prejudice but instead of the love interest getting dissed for his toxicity and then reforming, it’s just two people bonding over dissing a dead toxic asshole.

Now consider: Humans doing that to the fae. Not being captured by the fae folk, not taken against their will but stubbornly walking in to their realm and refusing to leave before one of them agrees to take this damn creature. Faeries telling each other "naww come on, you can't make it leave, it already ate your food. Everyone knows you gotta keep them if you've fed them."

both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)

typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:

(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.

the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)

uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)

anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)

a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:

the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)

a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):

i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)

the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:

as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.

and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):