Luzula

My latest batch of books! \o/
( Read more... )

And now I'm trying to resist looking at further pretty papers on the internet...

I see I wrote a draft of a post complaining about how my nose was clogged up and I was not allowed to take the nose spray anymore, and I couldn't sleep because of it. But suffice it to say that I have had a bad cold which has lasted three weeks. /o\ It's still ongoing, but I'm on the mend now.

I made another book! This one has blue cloth on the spine and a matching blue marbled paper on the covers. Note the ribbon placeholder, I haven't done that before. I'm almost completely satisfied with this one; it has some small asymmetries in how the covers are glued on, but generally I'm proud of it! It's a collection of all my fic which isn't due South or Flight of the Heron.

( My latest book. )

After binding my ninth book, I think I've leveled up in my skills! I can think of no more mistakes to fix, anyway, and at each stage of binding, I know what to be careful about. And I'm quite happy with how it looks! : D I still wish I could stamp the title in gold or silver letters on the front of the case, but that's far beyond the tools and material that I have...

( Photos of the book )

I am going to make collections of all my old due South stories, because it would be very nice to have them on my bookshelves. Also my older non-due South stories, of course. But I can't decide how much I should strip them of the metadata and context in which they were written: who beta-read them, when they were posted, and in what community or for which prompt or challenge, and whatever other author's notes I made. Although I can't, of course, preserve all the comments and discussions that embed them in a fannish community.

One issue is how much work it would be, which is not trivial, because my hands ache when I type too much. Another is how I would format that metadata in a book--my best idea so far is to use the Latex "abstract" environment, which is what you have in the beginning of a scientific article written in Latex. It seems like a lot of bookbinders bind longfic, where of course it's not as much an issue, since you can just have a preface. Also not as much work as when you have lots of short fic!

This also leads into more philosophical questions--I suppose I don't actually trust the internet to last, let alone specific sites on it. When I'm eighty (assuming I live that long) would I be happy I preserved that information? Would anyone else? Or would it not matter much, given the probable general loss of that fannish community and the ephemeral conversations that were had in it?

I have now made five books. I've never actually made the same mistake twice, but the problem is, I keep making new mistakes! Also I never quite get the hang of glueing the endpaper to the board, so there are always wrinkles. /o\ My favorite part is sewing the signatures together, because you don't make mistakes doing that.

Things I resolved to do differently after book one:
- Punch through the signatures with the awl from the inside, not the outside.
- Not make the spine quite so rounded.
- Shape the bit of thinner cardboard that goes against the spine into a rounded shape before I glue it to the cloth (much harder to do afterwards!)
- Make the boards for the front and back slightly less wide.
- Get more practice glueing the end papers on.

Yep, I've got the hang of all those things now (well, except for the last one).

New mistakes made in subsequent books (I won't make these again, but I'm sure there will be more):
- Forget to keep a sheet of paper between the endpaper and the book pages while I paint glue on the endpaper, so that there are bits of glue caught on the edges of the book pages.
- Not check for and smooth out the small bubbles that can form when you glue the cloth onto the board.
- Work so much on smoothing out the wrinkles on the endpaper that my fingers make smudges on it (from the dye in the cloth, which I apparently touched with not-entirely-dry fingers).
- This one was the worst, because it ruined the shape of the book: be inattentive when I glue the case on, so that the side of it close to the spine is too far in and the pages actually stick out a little beyond the case. /o\

When I watch people glueing the endpaper on Youtube, it all looks so easy? I mean, many of them just close the case down--but when I tried that, there were wrinkles! What I do now is to try to smooth it on, but it never goes entirely well. The basic problem is that the wet glue makes the paper expand and you can't fit it into the space it ought to occupy, which causes wrinkles. Of course, it dries again, but. Arrrrgh.

I finalized the layout of the book in LaTeX (thanks for your typesetting expertise and opinions, jesse_the_k! ♥). Then I rearranged it into A4 signatures for printing. Annoyingly, I had 387 pages of book, which meant that whether I used five A4 pages per signature (= 400 pages of book), or six (= 408 pages of book), I would end up with quite a lot of white pages at the end. I went with five.

I ordered my bookbinding tools and supplies from Shepherd's, which store I can much recommend--they were prompt to reply to questions and prompt to send my package, which arrived within a few days. Just a week before Brexit would have made me pay customs on it, in fact! (As an aside: I pretty frequently order books from the UK, and will need more bookbinding supplies in future. Arrgh, Brexit. Sorry, I know you actual British people have magnitudes more trouble with it, mine is just minor annoyance.)

Next step, print book (at work...). I used this paper, which I found very nice! Then fold the signatures and punch holes for the sewing, here they are after that (see photo under cut). By the way, the method I follow is partly from armoredsuperheavy's instructions and partly from various youtubers. The instructions in the document say to open the signature face-down and then punch through with the awl, but I quickly switched to doing it from the other side (with a template to show me where the holes should go). The reason is that the side where the awl goes in looks much neater than the side where it goes out, and I want the neat side to be the one which will be visible later. You can see the difference in the photo.
( Photos and further process )

So far the most time-consuming thing has been the typesetting, because there were various LaTeX problems I ran into that don't come up when typesetting math articles. But now that I've solved those, typesetting should be much easier in future.

I haven't decided if I should attempt rounding and backing or just skip the step as many people seem to be doing. I mean, I'm not sure I could do it properly, because I don't have a means to screw the book into position while I bang at it with a hammer. Hmm.