I've been fond of Gen Urobuchi's writing since first discovering him through Psycho Pass in middle school. In late 2025 I decided to finally get into Fate by way of watching Fate Zero, which (though I enjoyed) is a pretty poor anime adaptation of his light novel. It was never officially translated to English, and mostly exists as a crowdsourced and completely un-proofread fantranslation hosted as plaintext on a forum wiki, or a very poorly formatted epub of of the same text. So when a friend mentioned wanting to read the originals, I was excited to whip out a skill I happened to pick up a little earlier in the year: bookbinding!
This was my second bookbinding project ever, so for ease of working I decided to combine volumes 1-2 into an omnibus. Having a bigger book means less agonizing over measuring and cutting things to exact millimeters, but it also meant I had about 3 weeks total to copyedit and typeset 500-600 pages, and then turn them into a finished book. I ended up having to rewrite almost full pages at a time, and just tunnel visioned on proofreading and typesetting it until about 4 days before my deadline.
My printer is cooperative, so after getting everything formatted, the actual bookbinding part was fairly straightforward. It's a letter folio, so two pages are printed side by side on letter paper and folded in half shortways to get 4 pages, which is nice because it means my 550 page pdf was only around 150 sheets of paper to print. The folded pages get stacked into pamphlets called signatures and then sewn together, which I remembered to take wip photos of!
Here you can see all the stacked signatures, and the cord it was sewn around. A lot of modern books pretend to be sewn on cords to have a kind of fancy or vintage feel, but in this style of binding theyre structural elements and give support to the spine, and then are used to attach the covers (which I did not remember to take a picture of). The combination of folds and sewing thread makes the spine thicker than the opposite edge, which is called swell. The second photo there shows how the spine is rounded to offset the folds/seams and minimize that swell. The cloth on top is cheesecloth glued down to strengthen the spine.
I was honestly expecting these to be unwieldy or delicate decoration pieces, but the level of construction makes them handle pretty well.
+ Photos my friend sent of both volumes together after I got to the second omnibus.
We call it the Kotokiri bible. I did add a gay sex scene.




















