So, the Lectern Bind.
As the Renegade Europe Retreat and
ficwip's Level Up event coincided, I decided to combine them. Originally, I had planned to use this typeset for a K118 bind for Level Up, but lectern is also Cool™️.
In preparation to this, I already had learned new things in Affinity:
- The Books Function
- Automated Index
The books function I don't see myself using anytime soon again, if ever. Each chapter has it's own file and could theoretically by synced.
However, creating a new chapter file, multiplies your masters. So… which master is applied in a given file? I have no idea, there's a shitload of the same ones. 🤷🏻♀️
Did I get any benefits from the books function? Nope. Maybe others have use cases for this. I don't. Which is also a good thing to have learnt. I now don't need to keep wondering.
The index? Works as intended, even across all the different files in a book.
Now. When I had begun with this typeset, Affinity V3 was new. And every time I dared to click into the index file, the program crashed. Poof. Gone. I submitted bug reports a few times, after each new update and then just gave up and started to recreate the typeset in V2.
When finalising it for the Retreat, I dared to open the V3 index file, clicked inside and… no crash! After a few months, they finally got their shit together. Affinity as well, leveled up! 🙭
And that's it for the Affinity part of this. Let's head off to the Retreat!
The Lectern Bind Workshop happened in three parts throughout Sunday, which is why I didn't do anything else that day. Needed to take breaks in between.
The Dragonfly of Adventurous Bookbinding.
Of course, I glued them down a little wrong at first.
After coming back to the second part of the workshop and leaving the glued parts to dry, I was delivered a nasty surprise:
I must have done something wrong with filling the bookcloth. Other pieces I made with the same paste/acrylic medium mix were fine, so I guess I might have been a bit too stingy with covering this cloth piece in it.
Anyways, soldiering on and glue the overlapping flappy bits down:
And finally, it was time to glue the textblock in to create the wonkiest and most crooked book I've ever bound so far:
It does do the party trick, though. Thus, Book Successfully Created. 🙌🏻
All in all, I'm not sure when next I'll do a lectern bind. It's a such a cool concept, a book coming with it's own lectern. Could be used for song books, cook books or whatever you might like to stand open on itself. But some parts of it, including that botched cloth, make me shy away for now. The results feel mixed and that dampens the excitement more than it has any right to…
And here are some pretty shots of the finished book:
#bookbinding
