#classics binding

[plor-bindery]

Bound: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

This one is for a friend, whose spouse made me a bench hook. I used @canon-in-too-deep's delightful free typeset (thank youuuu!) Binder friends, if you're not already perusing and using canon's typesets, I urge you to take a look! They are so well done, beautifully laid out, and so lovely to look at.

While the book and the cover colour were both at the request of my friend, I think P&P is my favourite book in the world, so it wasn't exactly a hardship to dig into this bind. I'm very fond of my Oxford World Classics copy from my uni days, and I also own a Penguin clothbound version... but I might need to make my own someday.

I reflected already on how this started off as a cursed bind, but I'm happy to report that though the text block cuts are not perfect, the book itself came out quite well. I'm thankful I didn't give up and start over!

Process and materials as per usual under the cut.

Materials: First time using faux leather! I am still not sold -- it's just wooqu's version of the stuff, and while the colour and texture are nice, it's quite plasticky overall. But I remain uninterested in real leather, so I suppose it's good to start trying some faux options. It was a little harder to crease/turn in, and wanted more patience with my mix. But it was easy to wipe errant glue off, which was kind of a treat. Also easy to mark with a hasty fingernail, less good.

The rest is nothing new: ledger paper (24 lb Xerox) cut down to short-grain letter (badly). I sewed on tapes since this baby is 440 pages, but used waxed cotton floss because my linen thread is quite heavy and I was worried about swell. I also used a bone folder to flatten each signature around the thread as I sewed it, which helped. Basically no swell! So far so stable?

End papers are scrapbook papers. Endbands are cotton floss on leather cord (yes, I sewed them; yes, it was a weird choice for a friend who probably won't care. I wanted the practice!)

I bought the peacock cover art when I was doing an early bind (Probationary Action, I think) from a seller on Etsy. Yes, it was horrifying to weed.

Process: As mentioned above, this started out as a cursed bind, but I pulled it out of the fire pretty well by the end! I did a trial run applying HTV to the faux leather because I was worried about the heat melting the material. It didn't seem to have that issue, but the carrier sheet for the HTV left indelible impressions wherever I pressed the edges into the material. (I press with a cheap Amazon mini-press, but I don't use a huge amount of pressure.) So I decided to do a cover/spine design that would allow me to use a full sheet of HTV that ran edge to edge on each part of the cover, so I didn't have to worry about that edge marking issue. It worked!

I have tried rounding and backing spines before, but it's almost impossible to do backing well without backing boards, which in turn need a lying press or finishing press, and I'm still over here working with wrapped bricks and two cutting boards with carriage bolts and wingnuts. So I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid needing to round/back. 20-page signatures help! Lighter thread! etc etc. I did one rounded spine (a bind of Sense and Sensibility I've never shared here) and it was... okay? Without backing, rounding is mostly an aesthetic choice anyway.

I need to get my guillotine sharpened. There was a whole saga a month back with me trying to level the blade and almost slicing my fingertip off (ouch) but the result was that I had trouble putting the damn machine back together properly and the blade sat on the fence a bunch while I was figuring it out, which definitely dulled part of the blade. I'm procrastinating about getting it done because a) terrified of cutting myself again getting the blade off and b) mad at myself that my almost new guillotine already needs this service. So for now, I'm just shoving scrap paper under every text block I cut so that the dull bit of the blade is failing to cut the waste paper and not the block. Works? Annoying, but works?

See, this is the problem with a writer doing a craft, I won't goddamn shut up once I start typing.

[dove-tears]

genderfluid isaac animal jam real (if any ajc players want a copy hmu!!!!)

[towns-end-bindery]

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

By Jules Verne

🌊🐙🐳

Boy this was a lot of foiling, and my hand definitely hurt by the end of it. Despite my efforts, the hand foiling is quite patchy, but somehow aesthetically it kinda works?

I printed the pattern on inkjet canvas first, then I laid over it a printout of the leaf border pattern (originally designed by @alderdoodle). I used vellum paper so that I could see the cover underneath and line up the pattern. Then, once everything was secured with tape, I inserted green foil between the vellum and the cover. From there I traced the pattern by hand with a foil quill. Meanwhile, the spine was debossed first with a foil quill and then filled in with gold paint.

This is the biggest book I’ve ever tried to rebind, and I’ve learned that the weight of the text block is definitely something I need to consider more in the future for how I decide to construct the case. Even with the mull, the inner shoulders feel quite weak unfortunately. I should have either chosen stronger endpapers, or done more to reinforce the marbled paper I used, especially at the hinges to prevent the text block from sagging.

Apart from the leaf pattern, all other elements are from Canva.

————

You can also check out this post on my Cara or Mastodon.

[s-aint-elmo]

no thoughts head empty the oppressive stagnancy of legacy in ever after high dragging me round the block yet again

it's such a shame that we get so little explanation about the actual mechanics of destiny, which is the entire premise of the show, bc it's so juicy. like what power does destiny hold when you rip away milton's lies and centuries of assumptions and traditions. esp bc despite raven signing herself as the evil queen in the real storybook of legends, when the snow white fairytale actually happens in dragon games she's playing one of the seven dwarves and her mother has reprised her role. like how much of that was because of the characters' actions and how much was destiny pulling on old, familiar threads. keeps me up at night.

a lot of this is probably just like, plot holes and writer hot potato but i like making it that deep, that's half of the fun. my personal interpretation is that fate is a wild thing that desires repetition and they developed the system of fairytale legacy bloodlines to keep those repetitions predictable and contained, instead of wreaking havoc whenever and wherever they please. 

which lends itself to some really juicy exploration of how legacy is a duty as much as it is a privilege, and how to be a princess or a witch or a hero or a dragon is to be the same thing in the end: the lamb destiny slaughters on the altar to sate the ever-ravenous narrative. to keep the flock safe. keep the unknown that prowls beyond the beaten path at bay. because if a there is always a mother who will be cruel, or a maiden who will fall into a sleep like death, or a child who will become a bird, isn’t it better to know who, and how, and when? isn’t better if it’s you, who has known your whole life that you must be eaten, be poisoned, be stripped of your humanity, rather than anybody else, who wasn’t raised to see it as an honour instead of a great and terrible injustice?

[perfectlynormalbooks]

Tiny little octavo binding of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, that classic lesbian vampire horror story. Typeset by @kulapti for the Renegade Tiny Books Exchange 2024, and one of the copies (the one with the slipcover) is securely with her now!

I recently obtained a bunch of wax-seal tools for the purposes of sending fancy letters to friends, and this felt like the right addition to the book. I had all of the pieces lying around already - the cover fabric in particular was just perfect - which has made this one of my favorite binds I’ve done this month.

[getfuckedblr]

i’ve been working on this since january. i’m both so fucking glad it’s done and also a little bit disappointed with it. i made my own book cloth and you can see where the heat n bond has seeped through the cloth bc it go too hot, the small spines i really should have thought of while making the typesets, and should’ve upped the font size to make it larger. i think i was so focused on finishing it that i maybe got a little lost in the details u know?

but anyway! i wanted to try my hand at the inspired by clothbound classics covers, and i’m pretty satisfied with how that came out! it was a lot of fun to decorate these with their charms on the bookmarks (my fav is the little tiny perfume on teenage wasteland. like how cute!! and tiny!!) and to try not to get too caught up in reading when i was editing.

i love all of these stories so much and i’m so excited to have made them all into physical books!

[fartoomanyeyes]

Hello :)

I discovered book binding as somewhat of a new hobby for me and thanks to tumblr, I had a great start with so many nice people sharing their personal work.

So I thought, I might just do that myself. I made some book covers and also a formatted pdf version of "Yesterday Is Here" by CirccusGrey. It is one of my favourite TMA fics out there and it and the author deserves so much love!

This is my Google Drive I´m using now to share my designs, if some of you are interested :)

Lots of Love

Izzy

P.S.: the QR Code gets you to the AO3 page of "Yesterday Is Here" lol

[odessastudies]

Hello~

Welcome to my online abode. Here, I will post about my time in academia and related interests, such as reading and drawing.

This will likely be edited as I learn to create introductory posts better. For now, if you enjoy anything on this list, consider giving me a follow:

Academia

Reading

Writing

Poetry

Studying

Organization

Caligraphy

Book Binding

Archaeology

Archiving

Vintage

Antiquity

Middle Ages

History

Philosophy

Anthropology

Botany

[rye-bot]

Hey guys I wanted to share my most recent bind of Frankenstein!

[sysig]

Show some restraint, would you? (Patreon)

[fataltwelves]

something that i'm supposed to be

[dove-tears]

wtf they going places

[stars-and-suns-and-boobs]

I’m taking a book binding class today!!!📚

[nocturnus33]

An in browser tool for generating Penguin clothbound classics style book cover SVG images by acestronautical.

I found this simple and useful tool. It is easy to use, just make sure you read the instructions carefully.

[morganali-books]

Of course, while I was hitting up Project Gutenberg for Bookbinding books, I had to see if there was a version of one of my favourite classical books - Jane Eyre.

As before, I formatted it in Word for print. For this one, I learned how to trim the pages with a chisel - it's a lot of work, but the resulting page edges are very satisfying.

I stitched in headbands to the top and bottom of the textblock, and the cover is made from the DIY bookcloth using book glue, and a faux leather style bookcloth for the spine, corners and name plate.

Though I did attempt to learn how to do gold foiling, I could not get a satisfactory result, and used a metallic gold pen for the text and gold edges.

I tried to seal the gold on the faux leather bookcloth with an artist's spray fixative, and learned the fixative spray *will* make the bookcloth look a little cloudy. So the more you know.

[tenth-sentence]

To get a feel for the ideas, imagine unbinding a copy of "War and Peace," throwing its 693 double-sided pages high into the air, and then gathering the loose sheets into a neat pile.⁵

5. I am imagining that we are using the Modern Library Classics edition of War and Peace, translated by Constance Garnett, with 1,386 text pages.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene