Long time no bind

Hey everybody,

Sorry for kind of dropping off the face of the earth in 2023. It was a rough year -- tl;dr a lot of festering RL work stuff exploded in spectacular fashion toward the end of 2022, and the fallout caused a lot of stress-induced health problems that killed my ability to do, uh, pretty much anything creative. But! At the beginning of December, I started a new job that's already lowered my stress levels considerably, and my brain is slooooowly inching back online as I explore wild concepts like "a full night's sleep" and "no more crippling migraines every other week." MADNESS.

I have high hopes I'll be able to get back into fanbinding in 2024. That said, it's going to take me a while longer before I feel comfortable taking on commissions again; I'm also rethinking my whole commission structure after seeing how other fanbinders have abused the process, how fic authors have reacted in turn, and pondering my lifelong stance on Fandom As Gift Economy. Generally, I think it's fair to pay for the material cost of physical works -- but I also hate how fandom has become yet another side hustle, and I despise binders who inflate their material costs while churning out subpar work. I might only allow commissions for author copies in the future. I might do an occasional lottery for a free book. I might ditch commissions entirely and just fling free books at everybody! I'm still deciding.

Either way, if you're still here, thanks for sticking around. May 2024 bring us all more great fic to enjoy. ❤️

(OH ALSO I finally registered the excineribusbooks.com domain, it just directs to my old carrd right now but y'all will be the first to know if it turns into, like. an actual ~website~)

The Vienna Game by @paratactician

My finished contribution to the @fandomtrumpshate craft bazaar! Honestly, this may be my favorite typeset I've done to date, combined with one of the more elaborate cutout designs I've made in a while. (I learned the hard way that it's time for me to change the blade on my Silhouette cutter, lol. Protip: if it's chewing up the paper/cloth on skinny elements like the pixellated raindrops + puddle here, get a new, sharper blade!) It included all the 80s cyberspace nonsense/vaporwave aesthetic I could cram into one book, some intensely sparkly decorative paper that popped against the black bookcloth exactly how I hoped it would, and yet another excellent last-minute endpaper find courtesy of the Renegade Retreat.

As I've gotten more proficient at typesetting, I've found I really love creating visual markers for POV swaps -- in this case, changing the drop caps and scene dividers depending on whether the chapter was from Sollux or Terezi's POV:

And of course, I have to give a huge shout-out to @isozyme and @roach-works for letting me include their art! (Alas, I forgot to snap a picture of roachpatrol's art before sending off the book, but it's this A+++ piece right here.)

As always, thank you so much to beanutbutter for their incredible generosity during FTH, and to the whole FTH team for running the auction! If you haven't had the chance to read "The Vienna Game" yet, you can at the link above.

we waste the same day like nobody dies by @magpieandwhale, illustrated by @cloudy-recesses

I've lovingly referred to this project as "We Waste the Same Day Like Nobody Dies: The Illustrated Edition" ever since its inception [mumblemumble] months ago (since, if you haven't seen it yet, @teleportbooks also made a beautiful binding of the same series!). magpieandwhale is another friend I've known for TWENTY FREAKIN YEARS somehow; I knew I was going to make her a copy of this as soon as she finished it, and I had the great joy of giving it to her in person last week while in her city for a family wedding ❤️

This was another design that got slammed sideways at the last minute by finding the perfect cover paper. Last month, Renegade Publishing had its first-ever retreat, which included plenty of paper for swap and sale -- and what should I find on the swap table but that incredible gold-and-black Art Deco-ish stuff? It fit so well with the titling I'd already done that I immediately switched it up from a full cloth binding to a quarter-binding, with an inset carved out of the board for the title to sit in. For contrast (and a little intentional clashing), I went with silver-and-black on the endpapers, to play with the idea of Xue Yang and Wang Haoxuan as two not-quite-separate entities with much more in common than either wanted to believe.

The spheres in the cover design reference a scene partway through the third story, "shatter what you will not carry":

And the art! THE ART. cloudy-recesses, thank you so so much for letting me include so many of your incredible pieces -- whether they were made especially for the fic or just so fitting that magpieandwhale yelled "THAT ONE! I LOVE THAT ONE!" as we were hashing out what to include.

You can read the whole series at the link above, and see a whole lot more of cloudy-recesses's art on their Tumblr!

Resource Post: Supplies, Equipment, and Software

So I've had some people ask about the supplies and equipment I use to make my books! This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it an official tutorial on how to make a book (for that, I recommend starting with Renegade Publishing's resource documents, DAS Bookbinding, or SeaLemon's YouTube tutorials -- all free, no patreon required!), but if you're floundering because you don't know what you need to get, hopefully this will help a little bit ❤️ If I discover more good resources or change up my style, I'll add to this post.

Of note: I'm based in the US, so this list is unfortunately pretty US-centric. Apologies!

The FTH auction is CLOSED!

Thank you so much to everyone who put in a bid -- I was absolutely floored to see what a response it got.

And congrats to the winner, beanutbutter! I'll be emailing you within the next 24 hours to start arranging everything 😄

Oh, crap, thank you for letting me know -- I was hurriedly setting everything up on mobile yesterday morning and forgot to hide the column. It's hidden now!

Fandom Trumps Hate 2023

Hey everyone! For Fandom Trumps Hate 2023, I'll be joining the crafts bazaar and offering up a fanbinding work.

Fandom Trumps Hate is a yearly auction to raise money for progressive charitable causes -- you can find out more about it here, including the list of charities they're supporting this year. If you bid on my auction and win, you'll be sending the money directly to one of the charities on that list. It's a great way to support vulnerable communities AND get something cool and fannish out of it 😄

If you're coming from the official FTH site, you can take a look at my past work at the #ex cineribus books hashtag here on Tumblr. If you decide you'd like to bid, please look over my Carrd first for more information about what kind of fanfic I will and won't bind. (LEGAL NOTE: this isn't officially a commission, despite what the title of the Carrd says! Like I said further up, I won't be receiving any money for this work, not even for supplies.) The tl;dr: I'm open to all fandoms except Harry Potter, for works between 30k-150k words, but do have some DNWs/triggers that I ask you check beforehand. You'll also need to get permission from the author first unless (a) you wrote the fic, (b) it's a surprise gift for the author, or (c) the author's made a public statement okaying not-for-profit fanbindings of their work.

When bids open on March 1st, you can fill out this form! Bidding starts at $25; you can view the current high bid at this spreadsheet.

Good luck, and if you have any questions, DM me here or shoot me an email at excineribusbooks @ gmail.com!

Hey! I'm working on a big list of supplies that I hope to post this upcoming week 😊 In the meantime, I always recommend folks check out the resources at @renegadepublishing -- they not only have some great tutorials and resource lists, but a gigantic Discord full of fanbinders eager to help newbies.

The Crimson Lotus by @bonibaru

Pop quiz! You've got a fic that revolves around a secret identity. Do you create an inlay or a cutout on the cover?

Luckily, I had a ton of photomanips to pick from for the cutout portion -- nearly every chapter included a graphic or two. Which led to another design question: while typesetting the fic, did I want to sprinkle the graphics throughout like I've done with fanart in the past, or collect them all in one place?

The graphics were part of the summaries and/or author's notes, and they weren't always chapter-specific; plus, they occasionally had their own captions that worked great on AO3, but might've interrupted the flow of the story in a typical book. So I decided to go with the latter and create a "bonus materials" section that included the graphics, some info about outtakes/side chapters, and the chapter-by-chapter author's notes.

You can read "The Crimson Lotus" at the link above!

quick clarification!

A few people in the tags of my last post were like, "HOLY SHIT, HOW DID YOU GET THE DESIGN SO NEAT AND CRISP WITH A HANDHELD FOIL QUILL??"

and my secret is....... it wasn't a handheld foil quill 😅

We R Memory Keepers also makes a foil quill attachment for cutting machines like Cricut, Silhouette, etc -- you can set it up the same as you would a sketch pen, and it'll foil the design onto your bookcloth. The initial setup is a little finicky, but as you can see, it works beautifully one you get it going! I've only tried it on commercially-available bookcloths that say they "take blind and foil stamping well" (Arrestox is a favorite of mine), because it's pretty functionally similar to a hot stamping machine if you do it right.

I hope to write up a post with more details soon! It's such a good alternative to HTV, for real, and you can do so many pretty things with it.

symmetry by bleuett

Much like when I got my first taste of drop caps, I've become a foil quill menace. I've always liked hot foiling more than HTV for preservation reasons -- vinyl plasticizers and adhesives can turn pretty gross after a few decades -- and this book gave me the chance to try a full design in nothing but foil. It fit perfectly with a sci-fi Wangxian AU!

Circles play a big role in the story, so I included them in as many places as possible: the cover circuity, the endpapers, the scene dividers (a little mini solar system map!), and the title page. The title design also reflects Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian's traits in the fic, with Lan Wangji always looking to earth and Wei Wuxian always looking to the stars -- a complementary mirror of each other.

The whole of "symmetry" is just lovely, and I hope you'll read it at the link above!

It is! Good eye 😄 Technically it's the "Nile" colorway that Colophon Book Arts sold, but they used a lot of different names for their Duo offerings, and it's functionally identical to Mud Bath.

forgive us the days forgotten to fear by @animatedamerican

So I've known Batya for close to twenty years now. (Holy shit.) Every year, our friend group does a secret holiday craft exchange -- and when she proudly told us she'd just finished writing her first big novel-length fic, I sidled over to the organizer and went, "Hey, so... can I game the system a little this year and make Batya a book?"

My reach felt like it exceeded my grasp a bit at times, because the entire de Rolo crest? That's a bookcloth inlay. I jigsawed together all those tiny (and not-so-tiny) pieces from five or six different colors of bookcloth. There was one horrible moment where I upended all of them on the floor and almost wanted to commit crimes, BUT! It worked! I already know what I want to tweak the next time I do such a complex inlay, so this was a great learning experience AND a great chance to make a gift for a lovely person ❤️

I also finally switched away from Lora as my default body text. I'd never been super-happy with its kerning in a few spots, but it took a bit to find a good replacement: Libre Caslon Text, which has a similar visual feel and far fewer kerning problems.

Be sure to read the fic at the link above!