A place to place the books that I bound

I think this is the first time by experiments have gotten the better of me in very big ways.

But I digress.

This bind - Wildflower by sailingthenightsea - is one that I had wanted to do for a long while. Back during the pandemic days, this fic helped me to uncover the diversity that is the Sleepy Bois Inc. fandom. So when it was finally time for me to begin work, I wanted to honor the fic's themes by going on a different bookbinding path.

On the 1st of April 2022, Reddit unveiled a white blank canvas where every user had the ability to place one colored pixel in every 5 minutes. At its height, about 4 million people participated in one of the biggest internet collaborations ever made. The ripple effects reverberated into news reports as far away as Turkey, and the final canvas represents a snapshot of the multiple communities, events, memes, and what was popular around the world at that time.

This is a documentation of the Hermitcraft mural on r/place 2022.

aka.

Remember what I said about my latest ficbind being a distraction? This is what I wanted to be distracted from.

Cleo and Joe - and others - discuss buttons machines God and the Garden of Eden by @silverskye13

So there I was, neck-deep in a big project at work, silently grumbling on how slow it's been going and how much work needs to be done at home with my upcoming big bind project.

So I decided to ditch work and scroll through Tumblr.

And lo came a small fic that attracted my eyeballs.

Cue distraction bind!

( more info and pics in the cut! )

Not a bookbinding post! But a snapshot of something rare: two copies of two different bookbinds, going to the same author.

Among members of the Renegade Guild, it is encouraged to create two fanbound copies of an author's work. One for the self and one to be sent to the writer in gratitude for their work. Given the expensive shipping fees between my home country and the rest of the world I've never given it much thought when I started fanbinding.

Until I read the short stories of Jonathan Edelstein.

He was one of the very few writers who I want to create something for in gratitude. I have read his stories since the 2010s and they have molded me into the person I am now. So I saved my money, gathered my materials, and made double copies of the two short stories that meant so deeply to me; First Do No Harm and Ten Pages from the Gazetteer of Time.

Just these two books cost me a lot on international shipping fees, especially since the author lives and works in New York City. But to me, the effort was worth it, for his effort created worlds that still live on in my imagination today.

After the month-long odyssey that was my last bookbind, I decided to take it easy and embarked on something much simpler and easier: a short story.

Then I decided to rizz it up a bit by adding photos, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I have known the lawyer/author Jonathan Edelstein for almost a decade, and I have enjoyed much of his works and short stories as they are published from forums to speculative fiction magazines across the internet. After taking up bookbinding, I soon realized I could create a fully-printed copy of his earliest published work: First Do No Harm.

First Do No Harm is a tale that is uncommon to come by; an Afrofuturist, neo-galactic, post-apocalyptic medical drama. I shall not reveal the plot, but I am struck today by how such a combination of settings, tropes, and genres are still uncommon in wider western literature, which says a few things on popular taste, but I digress.

As with my last bookbind, I placed relevant images to add to the story's mood. And as before, I also added a meta and comments section. The tale was first published in a forum before being polished and shined in a magazine, and I preserved the comments of early readers there as both remembrance and for their discussions.

Full thanks to Jonathan Edelstein for his permission for me to bind his work!