My slightly insane hobby is fanbinding - which is essentially the formatting, printing, and hand binding of fanfiction. It combines a lot of my favorite things: fonts, ferreting out typos & eggcorns, tedious repetitive tasks, and an excuse to hoard exciting decorative papers.
This spring I took on the particularly insane task of binding a series of fics consisting of 16 separate stories and over a million words.
So here, in all its unhinged glory is the full series of Sum of Its Parts by KouriArashi, a wildly AU Teen Wolf fic that consumed my brain back when it was being written 10+ years ago and I felt deserved a place on my fanfiction trophy shelf now that I my skills have maybe reached a point that I might be able to tackle a project this big. And it almost worked!
There are 16 stories but 17 volumes because one was too long to fit in a single book and maintain structural integrity. With a series this long it was a bit of a challenge to source enough coordinating materials but I got there in the end. The size, legal quarto (four pages per side of 8.5 x 14 in paper) came from the fact that I found three reams at the local creative reuse store for $3 each. The cover paper is from a mid-90s road atlas salvaged from my great-aunt’s car (and it was a bit of a challenge to avoid pages that had her notes and highlights on them) and the endpapers all came from a paper pack hoarded from the Joann’s closing sale.
I started formatting the text for this monstrosity back in November but only for a few weeks and then picked it up again in late March. It took until mid-May to be ready to print (with a few breaks for other rabbit holes). To try to keep a little bit of individuality for each story I changed up the Splat (a dingbat font called WC Rhesus BTA (very catchy)) for each title page (repeated as the scene divider) and the ones used in the chapter headers. Title font is Problem Secretary.
Printing/Binding something this large was … interesting. I didn’t pay enough attention during the printing process and a couple books were printed twice (and in one embarrassing case three times). The actual binding went pretty well until I took the last book out of the press and realized I had made a mistake when folding the first signature and the pages were out of order. Still trying to come to terms with that one, honestly…
If you’d like more information about fanbinding, atlas obscura has a pretty good article about it, or check out the Renegade Bookbinding guild for a plethora of resources.