bzedan: (me-wig)
posted by [personal profile] bzedan at 06:52pm on 11/01/2025 under ,

One of my favourite things about winter is making a bunch of gifts for my family (who I am related to only one of, but: family). I like to have a “party favours” energy to it often. For a while I rotated through folks with who got “big” things that required more build time, but the past couple of years have been tired ones so everybody gets something a little smaller instead now.

This year, I decided to indulge my love of pamphlet binding and make little gifts of short stories only available online, or as part of larger collections. Pamphlet binding is just a delightful way to transform something ephemeral/online into a physical object. And it’s one of the easiest ways to make a book, I think.

A photo of a stack of half-letter pamphlets fanned out. All the covers are bright, some have gold detailing picking up the light.

There’s one I did three copies of (two gifts, and one for me) that I’ll share later, but here’s the first half of the bunch!

Let’s start with the silliest one. RE: REQUEST FOR PROPHECIES AND QUEST FUNDING APPLICATION GUIDELINES by Sara Ryan. When you’re sending a gift to someone who also binds books you want to have a little more silliness. This amazing short story, done in the style of a grant application, I bound in a re-sized manilla folder, using brads to secure the pages. These brads, btw, were salvaged from an archive project and I love that they show their age.

A photo of a hand holding a half-sized manilla folder labelled "Adventurers United".
A photo of the same mini-folder, opened, a hand lifting up pages to show how they can be read.

I had a lot of fun both using foil and finding free-for-personal-use fonts to act as section delineators (there’s a word for them but its escaping me). For The Nalendar by Ann Leckie (also available in her AMAZING short story collection Lake of Souls) I used Nature Boho by Edy Wiyono.

A photo of a half-size pamphlet titled "The Nalendar" in a vivid green. The title and a sketchy illustration of a lizard below it are done in gold foil and almost invisible in a flash of light off the foil.
A photo of the same book's title page, showing the same title and lizard, this time with a column of almost glyph-like arched shapes evoking nature scenes.
A photo of the same book open, to show some text on a page, sections delineated by a small arched image evoking sun through a window.

For Velvet Man by Leone Ross, I loved Under by imagex. I also drew the spotch that I foiled for the cover.

A photo of a half-size pamphlet titled "Velvet Man" in a vivid orchid cover with gold foil in the pattern of a stain wrapping around the spine.
A photo of the same book open, to show some text on a page, sections delineated by a row of fat scribbles.

I’ll share the next half in a new post, since this is getting a bit big!

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