Paste n' Paper

I was so excited when, after posting about the first copy of this fic I bound, I was contacted by one of the authors about getting their own copy.

We went with the black bookcloth because this was a known quantity for me. It made it so I was able to add the title and author names to the front cover!

I do this sort of lettering with paper, which may seem counter intuitive to some, especially those that use vinyl. But I use a thin paper that means there isn't much of an edge around the letters, and it's glued using book binding pva, so it's strong, flexible, and designed to bond well to traditional bookcloth. That means it has no acidic adhesive, like some vinyls, and won't yellow or crack or damage the bookcloth and cover in 10 or 15 years.

The downfall is that it can be a little more delicate than vinyl, and I can't add it to this type of spine. You can see in the video the spine is very flexible, and the paper itself would wear out with repetitive opening and closing. But a dust jacket would easily fix this, and I think the author has plans to eventually get one.

I personally think this second copy turned out even better as I had more knowledge under my belt. Very pleased and so honored to have been given some beautiful comments once it was received.

A few months ago I was asked by a client to bind Something In The Orange by @randomwordsandstormydays and @insomniamemoirs and I was happy to take on the commission (with permission from the authors).

This is by far the largest book that I've ever made. The final total was 528 pages, and even using relatively thin paper it still ended up as a hefty book.

I learned a lot making this and it's helped me to learn what does and doesn't work for formatting and binding a book of this size.

I was very happy with how the typesetting turned out on this. I'm not in the CoD fandom, so I worked closely with the client to make sure that the formatting and images worked with the story. They seemed very happy with the final result.

The one thing that I wish I had the skill to do would have been to make a dust jacket for this. The checkerboard book cloth is gorgeous, but I don't work with vinyl so I couldn't get the title on the cover. Something to think about for future projects.