batiferrite: (Default)
[personal profile] batiferrite posting in [community profile] fanbinding
Woo, I haven't done any bookbinding since February, so here's a quick project to get back into the swing of things!

To start off, this is a binding of a cute original oneshot "to be idle and blessed" by whalebone, about a robot who falls in love with a bubbly human gardener. And, like I said last time, this is a Steifbroschure. In his article / dialogue about this binding, Peter Verheyen talks about how this style of binding was often made as a quick, cheaper alternative to a more luxury binding. I just have to say: this method really does take out a lot of the stress of a normal case binding! You build the case right onto the book block, like with the sewn-board binding, so you don't have to worry about accidentally attaching it crooked or anything like that, which is nice! This binding also retains the shoulders that you'd expect in a "normal" book, unlike the sewn-board binding.



The front and back cover (shown in order below) don't match, but I think that makes for a cool aesthetic. They were cut out of an article of National Geographic about preserving plants, then covered in clear contact paper to keep them from smudging or the pigment being rubbed off or anything. It seems to have worked out quite well, actually! I've also had this particular roll of contact paper for over a decade now, and while I'm not sure if it's necessarily "archival quality," it hasn't yellowed and seems to work good as new, which bodes well for its longevity.




The endpapers:


And the internal layout:




I typeset it in Microsoft Word and used Momijizukamori's imposer to get the pages in the right place. (It's also a quarto, by the way, so fairly small.) Pictures are from Wikipedia Commons (minus one on the title page, which I found on a piece of stationery from a family scrapbook and fell in love with!). I feel like I probably made the font a little too big, so might scale that down a bit for next time...

I used a thin piece of card from the back of a notebook for the covers, so the end result is a little bendy. Again, I think that makes for a cool effect, honestly! Also, I left the boards exposed here, but if I do this type of binding again, I might want to wrap the edges with washi tape or something rather than just leaving them bare...


Overall, I think it turned out to be a very cute, successful project and I definitely want to use this binding again! ^^
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Profile

Bookbinding For Fans

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags