Early Adventures in Amateur Bookmaking

Published March 11th, 2026 --- Site Home --- Blog Home

happy 311 day to my mildly annoying pals. no hate, I like a few of their songs and all. just cracks me up a bit.

I'm currently fighting through the dredges of trying to retrieve my w-2 from the IRS after spending the past month trying in vain to retrieve it from my former employer that no longer actually exists. yes, they were supposed to mail it to me regardless. I'm getting more irritated by the day but it's ok, I'm handling it. I always wonder if I've stagnated since high school or not, but then something like this happens and I realize I handle things infinitely better than I used to. growth is hard to see in the moment and all that.

ok, all of that shit is insanely dull. the world is too beautiful and captivating in its mundanity for me to fixate on something as beige as taxes. earlier, I got to watch as a perfect line of water drained off of my roof and hit a leaf that was perfectly framed in the golden ratio curl of the wrought iron detailing on my porch rail. it was incredibly beautiful and only visible from a very specific angle. there are an infinite number of these pieces to be seen in our little spheres. concentric circles.

after years of wanting to, I've finally committed to learning bookbinding. I've got a whole selection of paperbacks to rebind lined up before I tackle making my own signatures. finished my first attempt yesterday and there are tons of amateur mistakes to line out but I'm very happy with it. it's so exciting to be able to learn another skill from the ground up again. almost from the start anyway anyway, I have a few years of leatherworking behind me now and there's quite a bit of skill/tool overlap. that helps quite a bit.

for my next attempt I'm going to widen the margin between the spine and cover boards so it opens easier. I'm also going to widen the cover boards a bit so there's more overhang and change the way I align the endpages because this attempt is pretty awful in that regard. I also really need to try harder to line up my lettering. but by god it is a functionally readable book and not a completely ugly one! the bronze paint goes really well with the dark green leather. and it's of course far healthier in this form than the half-collapsed mass market paperback it spent the first 43 years of its life as. seriously, you can find the edition I took the block from on ebay for like $4 USD. thank you bantam and penguin classics for haunting thrift stores long enough to introduce me to so many works I love. yay!