Fanbind: Take Your Shot (Reply) [Another journal]

Really, when it comes to fanbinding I clearly love a gimmick. My last go was making a mock Samuel French script and this time I decided to go for my beloved classic mass market paperback, soft paper and all.

I think I did okay for a first try? I was at the end of my glue bottle and pushing beyond my skills for the cover illustration (which is based on Gay Vets Ross Hossannah), but I am pleased with the end result. I’m already re-laying out the text block to incorporate what I’ve learned. I think the next try I am going to break the collection up so I can have two slim volumes that better fit the look of the mid-century era I was trying to evoke. See how thick this is next to the real thing!

A shelf of narrow mass marked paperbacks of the pulp variety. All but one are yellowed and cracked with age, with LCCN stickers on the spines. The one that stands out has a fresh-white cover and is titled "Take Your Shot." — I am making myself be satisfied with this cover stock, because I have a lot of it and it is the right weight, even if it is a modern level of optic-white and not coated.

Anyway here are the deets!

Story: Take Your Shot (series, unfinished) by Inbox.
Paper: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila for the body, 60lb double-sided Polar Matte from Red River.
Types: Overseer and Body Grotesque (Cover), Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia (Interior).
Binding style: Perfect binding.

Okay, pics!

A photo of a mass market-sized paperback on a worktable. The cover is the minimal skill painted style of mid-century pulp novels, showing a man in a lab coat smoking and looking over his shoulder at a man in a red beret and dark glasses taking his shirt off. The page edges are green. The novel is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — Even the cover not aligning right actually fits accuracy, tbh.

A photo of a mass market-sized paperback on a worktable, showing the back cover. The edges of the pages are green. The large part of the blurb reads "Arcade Gannon had a certain laissez-faire attitude to pleasurable acts snatched when the opportunity presented itself." — Blessed to be working from a collection with frankly delicious bits to pull from to make the cover text.

I think I did okay for the cover!! This is not my style and I straight up did a version to completion, hated it and tried again. On the rebind I’m going to have to make another cover illustration and I’m D: about it. That sprayed edge though–airbrush bb, thank you Createx Airbrush Colors in Opaque Aqua.

Now have some interiors.

A photo of a paperback book is held open to the title page by a clamp at one corner of a worktable. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. The title is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — Fun fact: Precipice Press was named by my player character in a years-long D&D game, who ran a bookshop (and eventually an artist books press).

A photo of a paperback book is held open to the first page of the story by a clamp at one corner of a worktable. Opposite the story is a page listing the individual stories on AO3 that the book is compiled from. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. — Fonts used (besides Overseer and Body Grotesque on the cover) are Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia.

A photo of a hand holding open paperback book to somewhere in the middle. You can see the edges were cut kind of roughly. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. The title is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — No, I do not have a chisel for my edges, nor a very good press setup. But I’m trying, man.

See, the whole build. All of this madness that consumed me for like two weeks-plus as I hunted paper etc.–this was all for this final thing.

My answer for “how do you bind an unfinished fic?” Like, how does one convey: this is complete but not done? I don’t know how much truly beat to shit paperbacks you’ve handled in your life (or if you’re part of the elite who have several with no covers), but there is a flavour to the texture of pages ripped out of this kind of book. Which is part of why the paper type was so important. I needed the effect to feel right and “nice” book paper isn’t it. Anyway:

A photo of a hand holding open a paperback book is held open to last page. Several pages have been roughly torn out between the last page of the story and the back cover. — Truly doing this build so I can have this effect at the end. The story is unfinished and does a nice emotional fade-to-black in my opinion.

I feel like this story ends on an emotional fade-to-black. Like YES I would like to read more, but the last update was in 2016? We’re almost a decade from that. And part of me is like, “these guys need their privacy for how they ended this,” in a way. So this felt right. And, I have kind of a thing around Books As Objects and that the wear on an object, how it degrades and is used over time, is a huge part of what actually informs the experience of a book. So: I added a bunch of blank pages to the end of the text block, bound this whole thing and then ripped them out.

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Fanbind: Take Your Shot

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