Work Text:
Renegade Publishing Tiny Books Bang 2023 - taking place in late spring/summer, with reveals in July. Yes I know it is January 2024, I'm late, what of it.
I JUMPED at the chance to bind this - agonised for a while about whether or not I got my first choice in claims - as this was a fic I already know and love and I had IDEAS for what to do with it. Amyda’s typeset was so inspiring, including a frontispiece and medieval-esque fonts, and since the fic features medieval romance novels (chivalric, really) I thought it would be fun to try to emulate the binding of the novel Starcrossed Love as described in the fic:
He waves an octavo at them. The cover has beautifully marbled paper, and black leather enclosing the spine with gilt decorations pressed in.
And there it is, with its dark calfskin binding, a single star stamped in gold on the spine.
This is an octavo binding (though printed on A4 paper, so a very small octavo - an A7-sized book), it has a leather spine (animal: unknown), marbled cove papers, and a star foiled onto the spine with a hot foil pen. for endpapers I chose Japanese Chiyogami paper as I’d stumbled over this particular pattern by accident and thought both the colour scheme and pattern matched the medieval vibe. the headbands are green and gold embroidery floss.
I struggled a little with the leather - which I’ve never worked with before - so my own copy (the first trial copy) didn’t come out as well, but lessons learned and the typesetter’s and the author copies came out beautifully.
my copy, using a different, thicker leather for the spine, resulting in no visible hinge at all:
it doesn’t look bad, but it’s not the vibe I wanted and I had to do a lot of infilling to account for the thickness of the leather since I didn’t have any leather paring tools.
the author’s copy is a different colour scheme for two reasons: I sourced the leather from the leather scraps bin in Shepherd’s, London, and the pieces were very small. I was only able to find two pieces large enough to cover the spine of an A7 (I’d brought along a dummy to test the scraps against) and the two pieces were different colours. I also didn’t have enough of the medieval-esque Chiyogamy for a 3rd set of endpapers so I chose a wildly different but striking Chiyogamy paper to match the colours of the leather and marbled paper. the headbands are dark blue and pale blue embroidery floss.
bonus: all three copies together:
