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!

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!

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.

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:

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.

I love to make problems for myself. So, when I fell in love with a FNV fic and decided to fanbind it, decided it needed to evoke the pulpy mid-century mass market paperbacks that I myself read and collect. The thing is!! To really get the right tactile umami of these books you have to have the right paper. But who wants to buy the kind of paper mass market paperbacks were made with in bulk? It’s not acid free, it’s toothy but squishy, off-white in a way that is delicious only to the real freaks out there.

Now, at one time the illustrious French Paper company had Dur-O-Tone which was based on “everyday utilitarian newsprint paper” and came in a lovely “Aged Newsprint.” But it is no longer available in text weight! So I set out on a mostly-free sampling (good paper places will at most ask you to pay shipping for a couple slips of paper as you test finishes and colours) of possibles.

First up, a couple colours of Royal Sundancefrom The Paper Mill, because I thought maybe “speckle” would hit something evocative. It did not.

Not the right vibes at all.

Well, that’s fine. How about a selection from the folks who’d made the good stuff? French Paper has white text weight, all of which were 70lb, which I felt would be too “real” and stiff but we’re trying here.

Like?! I guess the top one here (Kraft Tone in Index Off-White) could do okay (it looked better in person)? I ordered some more samples from French, focusing on their Kraft Tone and Construction lines. Still, I felt like there had to be something better our there. I poked around looking for 50lb text weight and found something that absolutely is not meant for bookbinding: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila.

I know it’s not acid free, or whatever whatever. But neither are the literal hundreds of my much-loved and read mass markets. And a ream of 500 sheets, delivered to pick up at my local Staples, cost half what a ream of not-quite-it from French would be. I figured, if it sucked for this particular need, I would enjoy having a bunch of drawing paper.

Because I have no chill, I opened the box in the parking lot. Having read many a book in the glaring Southern California sunshine, tiny black letters dancing in afterimage, I could tell right off that this was it.

Once home I ran a test print and under the warm house lights the vibes were even more spot on.

That second round of samples from French Paper are still wending their way toward me and I won’t be sad to have a more full understanding of The Nice Paper. However, every step of this latest fanbinding project has more and more solidly proved that this drawing paper is exactly what I’d been searching for.

I got into my head that Tamsyn Muir’s The Unwanted Guest needed to be bound to look like a Samuel French script. You know them, if you’ve done theatre. And although they’ve redesigned their covers, they looked the same for a very long time. I’d hoped to unearth one of mine as a reference (No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre), but I have no idea where it disappeared to in the two decades and half-dozen moves since I first marked it up.

Luckily, “vintage” acting editions abound in the second-hand world and I was able to find reference images to suit. I think I did a good job getting the vibe right. I made three copies, two gifts and one for me (which worked out great since I fully forgot orientation for my printer and the inside cover of my copy is upside down).

For this bind I added a lot of fluff, like inside covers advertising posters, other scripts available from the Mithraeum Play Service Inc. library and a new play available – The Noniad.

I also wrote little character descriptions, which I’m proud of. Luckily the script book I had to hand to physically ref was also a two-person play so it helped with the vibe. The inside text block is… fine. I realised way too late that I had mucked up the scene headers, so we won’t look at those.

Also fun: text on the spine. You know, to become completely rubbed off as your sweaty hands keep fussing with the script as you completely destroy it while memorising your lines. Probably nowhere near accurately bound but it gives the vibes.

This was a delight to do, and (other than messing up the scene headers) they turned out exactly as I’d hoped and imagined. The covers were off-cuts from a photo backdrop! The perfect colour I think.

As I posted earlier, I did some pamphlet binds of short stories for family gifts this year. Pamphlet sewing is my comfort craft, tbh. It’s always satisfying, easy to play with form, just a delight up and down. If you missed the earlier post check it out here.

Which is good because I had to make a grip of them in a week (I put things off a touch). I had done a very niche bind in a set of three as more specific presents, then realised I should just indulge myself and do something similar for everyone. You can get a peek of what the initial bind was here, but it will get its own post.

All this talk of pamphlet binding and this first one isn’t that. It’s three signatures, with a soft cover. I selected three favourite trope-based stories and wrapped them in the brightest dang red I have tried to photograph. The illustrations for each section I drew myself based off of images found in Wikimedia Commons.

The stories are:

• Getaway by Nicole Kornher-Stace, time loop
• If We Survive the Night by Carlie St. George, final girl
• Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim – what it says on the tin

One of the fun things with this project was thinking about what story would make someone the happiest – what they’d read and loved or had never read and might love. For this friend, I couldn’t think of a better match than Pockets by Amal El–Mohtar. The images were sourced from Wikimedia Commons, coloured with watercolour pencil and gold pen.

This one I haven’t mailed yet because first: I always mess up this person’s address somehow and USPS will say they don’t know where that is. And second: because we are very close to one of the big LA County fires and our power has been out and schedules disarrayed. Elves in Illinois by Sarah J. Wu is a true delight and the length pushes the appropriateness of pamphlet sewing.

This searingly bright bind is a fanfic for a very specific ship, if you have AO3, def kudos All The Things You Are by bossbeth, this is just chapter one.

Okay, I’ll get to the bind that started it all next. These were such a joy to make, there’s something very magical about being able to hold something in your hands you otherwise can only access on your phone.

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.

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.

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.

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

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