Playing with Book Binding

Leather Bound Books

Plant Journal Game

There is a little, single person paper game on itch, called The Yielded Peace of Little Ground that is all about growing plants. It is delightful. They have a version of it that can be folded to make a tiny booklet. I did not like the actual tiny booklet, but I liked the concept of a tiny booklet. And I had been watching youtube videos on bookbinding.

So I decided to make my own booklet version as a tiny leather bound book, using scrap paper and leather and tools I had available at home. You can see the images below. I used a little bit of green suede leather, and some cardstock scraps to make the covers.

Japanese Stab Binding

I was looking for a particular, kind of minimalist book binding style for a project, but I didn't know the name of it until I found it. It is Japanese stab binding, and I've since used it a lot for a great many projects, primarily because it's fairly simple, and you can make a lot of interesting designs. I also found this lovely design resource for laying out your patterns, and then tracking which thread to run next as you're stitching it.

Chess Rule Book

My PhD program has a break area for grad students, and a communal chess board on the coffee table. I'm friends with the most active players, and we had recently sat down together to play King of the Bridge. So, as a prank, I decided to make a rules booklet for the chess board... Using the rules from King of the Bridge.

I ended up reaching out to the creator through their discord server, explaining what I was trying to do, and they were quite happy to share the raw image files from the in game rulebook with the server. Other server members were also delighted by the idea, and one made a starting python script to convert the raw image files into a printable PDF. I was incredibly grateful, but I am also incapable of not fussing with things. So I made a proper cover page mimicing the original handwriting, and aggressively fussed with the images to upscale them to a proper print resolution. I also tweaked the pdf generator python script so it would create a pdf that would already print all the pages in proper signature format for a book.

The resulting files and documentation I then shared back with the server, along with the images of the complete book. You can find these items here. The book itself was my first stab binding project, and used a pretty simple, generic pattern. Full assembly documentation is actually included in the zip file.

Lunar: Vane, the Story of Inheritance

The Lunar game series is one I played a lot of back on the PS1, and it had some tie in comics that were never translated and brought to the states. One in particular was about the main villain of the first game, long before the beginning of the game. I read someone's translated summary, and saw a handful of images of the art on an old fan website, and desperately wanted to read it. So, when I found someone had translated it, and uploaded that translation to archive.org, I was ecstatic. I read it the whole way through. Read it again. And after learning how to do book binding... I decided I wanted to make a copy of it.

By this point I had learned how to do fabric and spine covers from my foray into leather bound binding, and I had learned about making proper signatures and stitch designs from making the chess rule book with stab binding. So I went a bit elaborate, using multiple glued together sheets of water color paper for the front and back covers, a thin, pale blue bit of fabric to cover the spine, and gold colored thread with a more ornate design for the stitching on the binding. It's actually also a pretty sizeable book, as the pages for the signatures were printed on 11x17 paper, because I was an absolute madman.

Lesbian Pirate Short Story

I wrote a short story some years ago titled DROP. It's a lesbian pirate story, and I'm not the best at describing it. That said, several years later, a friend wanted to run a booth at a pride event and sell stickers, but was afraid they didn't have enough content for a whole booth. I had content, but lacked logistics, so we split the booth. While trying to decide what to bring, I decided to make some handbound copies of this story, just to see if they would sell. I think they came out very nicely, and someone did actually buy one, but I don't know if they ended up liking the book. They were going through a lot at the time, and I really hope they ended up liking the book.

Final Fantasy Legend of the Crystals Art Booklet

I kept being undecided about how I wanted to handle all the concept and promotional art extras for my Final Fantasy Legend of the Crystals bluray project. I made a slideshow on the disc itself, but I'd really wanted it to work the way the old DVD art extras did where you could press the arrow buttons on the remote to go back and forth through the art. So, to provide a little bit more than just the slideshow, I decided to make an insert booklet that had all the art.

I went with stab binding for it, just because at this point I was pretty good at it, and I thought it would look kinda neat. I spent a lot of time laying out the booklet, and it is juuuuust barely able to fit inside the bluray case, oops. I put too much art in it.