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Feb. 20th, 2025 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helleboredSo lately I've been working on binding one of my fave fics, all-consuming, and when I offered the author a copy they were interested in progress shots. i don't get too technical here, i don't think, but i tried to cover a majority of the big steps that go into producing a book. it's been a joy! lots of fun to work on.
so-- i start with a typesetting program called affinity publisher, which lets you set up a book and edit its individual pages. I do title page design in there too, fret over typography and make everything pretty. for this story i wanted the aesthetics to be reminiscent of government memos (but Chinese), as well as a touch of horror for the zombie vibe. i didn't want to lean too heavily into the latter -- the story is, to me at least, a fiercely warm and hopeful love story above anything else (much like my favorite zombie movies, actually) -- but fortunately, top secret government aesthetics play very nicely with zombie stories in general, so all i really had to do was throw in some blood red accents to nudge the memo vibe a little bit more in the horror direction. i pulled up a bunch of documents from regional govt sites in China as reference for the title page style:
from the half a dozen i looked at, they often have a round stamp that has some combo of the city/district and department name, so i made a similar stamp for the title page & cover that says 龙城特别调查处 - lóng chéng tèbié diàochá chǔ - Dragon City Special Investigation Division. the font i used converted it to traditional, while the stamps are simplified, but i liked the look, so i just rolled with it, haha
i printed everything out on my inkjet (laser is better for most things, but i wanted color accents, so inkjet it is), folded every page in half with a bone folder, nested the pages into signatures, and shoved them under a stack of textbooks to squish because i still don't have this type of press (there are multiple presses involved in making a book, as it turns out):
Then i used a really fucking long piece of beeswaxed linen thread (~14 ft) to sew all of them together like so:
the online council of advisors advised me as to which endpapers i should use, so those got attached, and then it was rounded and backed -- which basically means the book gets glued and then gently encouraged into a rounded spine shape with the loving care of a hammer. Then it's shoved back into the press and the edges of the spine are hit (with the loving hammer) until they bend over and make "shoulders" so that it holds its shape better and the spine doesn't go concave after a few years. I did a meh job of it this time, but structurally it should be fine, so I'll do my best to let it go and not throw the entire textblock into the fireplace in a fit of pique over my imperfections.
ANYWAY, after rounding and backing, it was time for endbands. I've never done this endband style before, but all my friends do it and i wanted to get in on the fun. These are double-core French endbands, and they are wrapped around a leather core and sewn onto the textblock:
then...okay. so my printer was kind of a bastard to me -- only in a way that i am likely to notice and care about, which is nice after a fashion, because this textblock is over 500 pages and i do not want to print it again if i can help it. but it's also not nice, because even if nobody else notices, i would notice, that there were a bunch of tiny splotches along the very edges and subtle streaking in the margins. So i was like, okay, i can fix this, I'll just speckle the edges to hide that. I've never speckled anything before but how hard can it be? So i tried speckling it using a toothbrush and some watered down acrylic and promptly got big drips in a few spots that looked bad, and went, well, fuck it, and painted the entire outside black. Then i threw on some sparkly silver acrylic over top as seasoning. Fortunately i fucking love it and I'm so happy with how it turned out, so there's that. The effect is a little uneven inside because i don't trim my textblocks, which as a side effect means there's some variance in how much black ends up showing on each page, but i think it suits the sort of... ominous government grunge chic I've got going on in general here.
at this point i started affectionately referring to it as goth baby.
added some mull and papered the spine:
so for constructing the case (boards on front and back, and a spine stiffener), a bunch of different ways to do that exist. I used a method called split-board binding. The first and last page in the book are folded over and glued to the tapes and mull to make tabs, which are then glued between two boards to make the front and back cover.
after that dried, i added some paper to the inside of the boards so they curved in a bit, to offset the pull of the leather, and then it was leather time! I've never worked with leather before (lots of firsts for this project -- I've made a few dozen books, but there's always new and intimidating things to learn), so i don't have any pictures of this part because i spent the entire two hour ordeal panicking and trying not to fuck it up. Definitely things to improve on for next time, but thankfully i absolutely did not fuck it up and it looks pretty good to me, though I'm sure an expert bookbinder would have a different opinion. That's okay. This isn't going in the Louvre.
here's some of the finishing work, shaping the leather around the endbands:
After it dried, i noticed the boards curving outwards, so i added more sheets to the inside to correct for the leather's pull. I ended up doing that twice. it's considered okay for boards to subtly curve inwards, but outwards is not ideal, so i really wanted to make sure i properly accounted for the force leather exerts on the boards.
Then the endpapers got glued down:
Last step is foiling! I had to wait for my foil to arrive and run some tests to make sure i wouldn't fuck it up on the actual book, and then i graduated to sucking up my trepidation and foiling directly on the book. no pressure. it's not like there's nothing i can do if it goes wrong except cry, haha. haha ha
And here it is! Finished and ready to ship.
This was incredibly fun to work on. Multiple times i was afraid I'd fucked it up, and thought, oh well, at least i have another printed copy -- but it came out remarkably cohesive, with most of the little issues i noticed along the way covered up as the process went along. It didn't hold its round as well as I'd have liked, and there's a slight curve to the textblock itself (probably from moisture from painting the edges), but otherwise it's really quite decent. So stoked to get to pass it on! Next up is my own copy. 😄
so-- i start with a typesetting program called affinity publisher, which lets you set up a book and edit its individual pages. I do title page design in there too, fret over typography and make everything pretty. for this story i wanted the aesthetics to be reminiscent of government memos (but Chinese), as well as a touch of horror for the zombie vibe. i didn't want to lean too heavily into the latter -- the story is, to me at least, a fiercely warm and hopeful love story above anything else (much like my favorite zombie movies, actually) -- but fortunately, top secret government aesthetics play very nicely with zombie stories in general, so all i really had to do was throw in some blood red accents to nudge the memo vibe a little bit more in the horror direction. i pulled up a bunch of documents from regional govt sites in China as reference for the title page style:
from the half a dozen i looked at, they often have a round stamp that has some combo of the city/district and department name, so i made a similar stamp for the title page & cover that says 龙城特别调查处 - lóng chéng tèbié diàochá chǔ - Dragon City Special Investigation Division. the font i used converted it to traditional, while the stamps are simplified, but i liked the look, so i just rolled with it, haha
i printed everything out on my inkjet (laser is better for most things, but i wanted color accents, so inkjet it is), folded every page in half with a bone folder, nested the pages into signatures, and shoved them under a stack of textbooks to squish because i still don't have this type of press (there are multiple presses involved in making a book, as it turns out):
Then i used a really fucking long piece of beeswaxed linen thread (~14 ft) to sew all of them together like so:
the online council of advisors advised me as to which endpapers i should use, so those got attached, and then it was rounded and backed -- which basically means the book gets glued and then gently encouraged into a rounded spine shape with the loving care of a hammer. Then it's shoved back into the press and the edges of the spine are hit (with the loving hammer) until they bend over and make "shoulders" so that it holds its shape better and the spine doesn't go concave after a few years. I did a meh job of it this time, but structurally it should be fine, so I'll do my best to let it go and not throw the entire textblock into the fireplace in a fit of pique over my imperfections.
ANYWAY, after rounding and backing, it was time for endbands. I've never done this endband style before, but all my friends do it and i wanted to get in on the fun. These are double-core French endbands, and they are wrapped around a leather core and sewn onto the textblock:
then...okay. so my printer was kind of a bastard to me -- only in a way that i am likely to notice and care about, which is nice after a fashion, because this textblock is over 500 pages and i do not want to print it again if i can help it. but it's also not nice, because even if nobody else notices, i would notice, that there were a bunch of tiny splotches along the very edges and subtle streaking in the margins. So i was like, okay, i can fix this, I'll just speckle the edges to hide that. I've never speckled anything before but how hard can it be? So i tried speckling it using a toothbrush and some watered down acrylic and promptly got big drips in a few spots that looked bad, and went, well, fuck it, and painted the entire outside black. Then i threw on some sparkly silver acrylic over top as seasoning. Fortunately i fucking love it and I'm so happy with how it turned out, so there's that. The effect is a little uneven inside because i don't trim my textblocks, which as a side effect means there's some variance in how much black ends up showing on each page, but i think it suits the sort of... ominous government grunge chic I've got going on in general here.
at this point i started affectionately referring to it as goth baby.
added some mull and papered the spine:
so for constructing the case (boards on front and back, and a spine stiffener), a bunch of different ways to do that exist. I used a method called split-board binding. The first and last page in the book are folded over and glued to the tapes and mull to make tabs, which are then glued between two boards to make the front and back cover.
after that dried, i added some paper to the inside of the boards so they curved in a bit, to offset the pull of the leather, and then it was leather time! I've never worked with leather before (lots of firsts for this project -- I've made a few dozen books, but there's always new and intimidating things to learn), so i don't have any pictures of this part because i spent the entire two hour ordeal panicking and trying not to fuck it up. Definitely things to improve on for next time, but thankfully i absolutely did not fuck it up and it looks pretty good to me, though I'm sure an expert bookbinder would have a different opinion. That's okay. This isn't going in the Louvre.
here's some of the finishing work, shaping the leather around the endbands:
After it dried, i noticed the boards curving outwards, so i added more sheets to the inside to correct for the leather's pull. I ended up doing that twice. it's considered okay for boards to subtly curve inwards, but outwards is not ideal, so i really wanted to make sure i properly accounted for the force leather exerts on the boards.
Then the endpapers got glued down:
Last step is foiling! I had to wait for my foil to arrive and run some tests to make sure i wouldn't fuck it up on the actual book, and then i graduated to sucking up my trepidation and foiling directly on the book. no pressure. it's not like there's nothing i can do if it goes wrong except cry, haha. haha ha
And here it is! Finished and ready to ship.
This was incredibly fun to work on. Multiple times i was afraid I'd fucked it up, and thought, oh well, at least i have another printed copy -- but it came out remarkably cohesive, with most of the little issues i noticed along the way covered up as the process went along. It didn't hold its round as well as I'd have liked, and there's a slight curve to the textblock itself (probably from moisture from painting the edges), but otherwise it's really quite decent. So stoked to get to pass it on! Next up is my own copy. 😄
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Date: 2025-03-04 04:55 am (UTC)I meant to say not to rush yourself to post it to me, but then I forgot to reply for days and you've already done now (thank you!)