“Wait,” you say, “Bookbinding? You mostly have e-books, isn’t that kind of old-school for that?”
Yes… but.
Everyone who’s read my blog (or knows me) knows that I have written one novel, am working on a second, and have plans for a couple more. But eventually, one of my hopes is to be able to go to a convention and have a table and sell copies. (I also have ideas for buttons and pins, but that’s for later.)
I’ve also had some interest in bookbinding lying dormant for a while. And so, these things collide.
Where It Started
Many years ago, when I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I found the work of someone in my local group to be pretty interesting, but I never had the chance to go too deeply into it. His SCA name was Oswald von dem Grünwald, and he had some lovely things he’d created. He even wrote a pamphlet for the SCA’s “Compleat Anachronist” series about bookbinding in medieval times.
I was interested but never put aside the time to learn anything about it. (How different would life have been if I had…)
Flash forwards years later.
Where It Continued
I’m poking through YouTube one day and I came across a channel called Nerdforge. They do a lot of cool stuff, including things with resin, electronics, and lights, and much of it fantasy or SF theme. And one-half of them, a lovely young lady named Martina, was making a book.
They’ve done so many of them, they even have a huge playlist of the books they’ve made including creating huge versions of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, flying overseas, and presenting them to him. (Watch and see his reaction.)
They also did a full course on bookbinding that used to be Patreon-only, but they’ve since put it up on YouTube for free.)
An itch long forgotten began to rise up.
And then I found this set of videos from another bookbinder on YouTube, Four Keys Book Arts. A set that basically addresses all the concerns that someone like me has about doing something like this:
- From E-Book to Real Book: Chapter 1 – Typesetting and Imposing a 120+ Year Old Bookbinding Manual
- From E-Book to Real Book: Chapter 2 – Sewing, Rounding, Backing & Trimming
- From E-Book to Real Book: Chapter 3 – FINALE
And I Started Thinking…
I mean… is it that crazy an idea? It would be cool to go to a convention, sit at a table with my books, banner behind me, big handmade leatherbound versions of my books as eyecatchers…
A girl can dream, after all…
But The Ballad of the Grey Swan was a dream once, and so was Fiendblood, and Scarlet Bard, and Deciever, and all of Taeliana, and it’s becoming a reality. Maybe that’s not such a hard dream to chase after all.
I’d need the gear and the equipment, and to practice, and to figure out what I’d want the covers to look like, and and and.
But maybe it’s not crazy to dream, after all.