*sighs eternally*

Alright gentlefolks, you know I had to do it, so I present to you @gallusrostromegalus's Family Lore Story About The 1969 Easter Mass Incident aka the Bread Jesus Story because my brain generated an idea weeks ago and I was compelled to bring it to life with a hardcover 2-section pamphlet/booklet (also this was a challenge to try a new book binding style that's not a Bradel yet again:

Scoured the Internet Archive for something pretty I could use in the typesetting and found these gorgeous Mucha illustrated frames (see 4th image for name of the book), and yes I picked the one that depicted the crucifixion scene, haha.

And then the printer bugged out on me while I was reprinting a fixed version that was supposed to be black and white (the fucking Magenta ink tank is clogged clogged) so I decided to lean into the green and got out the jewel toned cardstock and the fancy American scrapbook prints (ouch import prices but worth it). The spine is just black bookcloth I made.

A couple of process and practice photos:

So it turns out when the conservation style 2-section pamphlet guide says you need to sew onto a strip of bookcloth hinge, it wasn't a suggestion because aw fuck, it was structurally important to not have a loose connection despite how much pulling and tightening you do (as seen in final photo between the practice typoed sections and the actual set). Lesson learned. Also, I definitely sewed on the bookcloth hinge backasswards but with enough PVA glue, everything will hold lol.

Typesetting this was fun though. Lots of evil cackling.

WTFWTFWT THIS IS SO FUCKING GOOD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Yeah im gonna be screaming about this all week, holy shit.

Book repair! I’ve been doing more and more book repairs at my library, and this book had torn at both hinges, so the text block was completely separated from the cover. But I fixed it!

I pulled up the end paper a bit from the cover so that I could insert my card stock under it to be glued in, then pasted it to the text block to replace the hinge. For extra security I added linen hinge tape. And I felt bad about covering the decorative endpaper, so I sketched in a continuation of the art on the front hinge. Maybe eventually I’ll go back and do the other side too.

Update! I checked out another library’s copy of the Percy Jackson mythology book so I could recreate the end paper art and we’ll just file this under ‘I did my best’, cross referenced with ‘hey original artist did you have to make the head such a weird angle’

But my main goal was for kids to be able to see what the picture is because I as a kid would have been driven nuts by not being able to tell and might even have tried to pry up the repair, so. Preemptively protecting my hinge repair from my childhood self.

It’ll do, pig.

A standard hardback book titled “Drowning in debt? A financial guide to keeping your head above water” by Eberhart & Strauss. The cover is orange/tan with imagery of £50 bank notes, two markings show it was on offer. The entire book suffers extensive water damage resulting in the destruction of the spine, fading of the covers and damage to text block. Pieces of pages have also been torn out.

The content of the book from what remains consists of nautical and water based analogies for describing financial turmoil. Despite the title there is little useful financial advice provided mainly just surface level jargon.

The book was found in a flat in West London after the resident had managed to drown in their living room. The flat was heavily water damaged but no neighbouring flats were affected. The book was found close to the body with torn pages still clutched tightly in their hand.

It’s believed that due to the damage done to the book it has lost a great deal of its power as there has been no successful recreations of the original event. What has been noted is that when left near water pipes they will eventually burst from a buildup of pressure. It’s interesting that the book was not protected from its own power instead suffering from its own actions.

From what research was done Eberhart & Strauss was a real business located in London however little information remains about them, it seems they went under sometime back. No former employees could be located. The book appears to have been published after their downfall. The book has been stored away from all piping and regular checks will be made as a precaution.

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

now THIS is a hardcover

what does this mean

i can explain in more detail with pictures when i get home from work, but executive summary:

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)

and also usually on recently manufactured books the entire case (the "hard cover" of a case-bound hardcover) is covered in paper, including the hinges, which is a terrible decision because the hinges are the part of the book that MOST needs the durability, being The Primary Moving Part. at least fucking cover the spine and hinges in bookcloth i beg. please. for me

sorry loser you lost me at this

get a real programming language dork.

thats why im using it as a clamp and not as a book :p

@just-evo-now i am back home! where my books live!! so i can take pictures of the bindings :D

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):

the cover is nonfunctional and the stabilizing paper on the spine has gotten so crumbly as to be useless (i got about halfway through peeling it off), but the textblock itself is in pretty good condition, because the signatures are sewn securely to each other -- if you squint you can kinda tell they used kettle stitches on the ends and chain stitches in the middle and i thiiink the chain stitches are where the loose loops on the top came from. anyway, i can pretty much finish peeling off the old crumbly paper stuff and glue on some new kozo paper (and ensure the loose loops are tucked safely away/glued down) and this bad bitch will be ready for a new cover!

I am really going to have to start paying attention to book binding going forward.

(via @trans-cuchulainn )

Another copy of American Gods by @neil-gaiman . Originally in paperback, rebound as a hardcover book in hand dyed red sienna leather with gilded pages edges and gold vinyl decoration depicting Shadow Moon standing beneath the tree Yggdrasil.

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here

*applause*

@theshitpostcalligrapher, a tome to match the Necrobeenomicon!

lib rawr y of alexandria

Fic: All the Things You Prayed For

By: @marywhal & @anonymousalchemist

Fandom: The Adventure Zone, Marvel AU

Art: @herbgerblin & @mspainttaz

Summary:

Taako's been dead for two years. Taako's been dead for seven decades. Depends how you count it.

Her brother is dead and Lup’s a whole lifetime into the future. It’s a brave new world out there and she’s trying not to think about it too hard. She gets the feeling that if she starts thinking, she won’t ever stop, and she can’t afford to be out of commission. She's the only Captain America the new century’s got.

(Technically, this is an Avenger Zone anthology, but the bulk of it is ATTYPF sooooo)

Sometimes you have to hold a fic in your hands to comprehend just how freaking invested and amazing the authors are.

This monster is damn good and shared for free. I knew fic authors were amazing, but there is a mental difference between "330,000 words" and "800 pages of tiny font" It's amazing. Be sure to thank fic writers, they write full length books for fun.

This was my first Big book and there was a lot learned between my test copy (for my shelf) and these two. Following proper instructions (thank you Hollanders) makes a world of difference.

As always, thank you to all the wonderful folks in the @renegadepublishing Discord for sharing their expertise. It made this process so much smoother.

this? is so incredibly cool. i have one of these books in my hands and on my shelf and it is beautifully and professionally bound!! i gave iz her copy of the book/fic today and she was also thrilled because holy shit!! it’s so good!! it’s so cool!!!! :0 we cannot thank toni enough for their generosity in sending us copies of the book after they bound them!!! they’re so cool!!!!