Episode 217: Fanbinding
On Episode 217, “Fanbinding,” Elizabeth and Flourish talk to Tiffo (aka Fanboundbooks) about the art of turning fanfiction into physical books, and the fanbinding collective known as the Renegade Bindery. Topics discussed include how exactly you make a book, Renegade’s origin story and huge growth in recent years, fanbinders’ firm commitment to the non-monetized gift economy, and Binderary, a month-long event this February with challenges, fan-run classes, and more. Plus! (Spoiler) Flourish literally joins the Renegade Discord during the recording session.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:45] Elizabeth’s piece on fanbinding and the Renegade Bindery! You can also learn about Renegade directly (and join their Discord) via their website.
[00:03:10] Our interstitial music throughout is “Max Flashback” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:58] Some fanbound books by Fanboundbooks!
[00:09:22] Here’s a montage of the fanbinding process from Celestial Sphere Press, and if you’re a visual learner Tiffo/Renegade recommend DAS Bookbinding on YouTube for the step-by-step process of making a book.
[00:10:24] He is perfect:
[00:14:41] A bit of an explainer about imposition (with visuals!). The Renegade-made imposer is here.
[00:18:48] Here’s a book from Beck, Chaotic Bindery made with the toner reactive foiling technique for titling accents in the text itself. And here’s one made with the hot foiling technique from MedRen of Mourning Mountains Bindery:
[00:20:15] Here’s an example of Coptic style sewing, and here’s sewing on tapes and cords courtesy of pleasantboatpress:
[00:21:11] Some finished text blocks, including endpages, from Fanboundbooks.
[00:21:57] Fanboundbooks’s collage of end pages that they used on books in 2023.
[00:24:03] You can see an example of airbrush painted edges by NonamePublishing, or fore edge art by Duran Binding including foiled edging with a hidden fore edge painting underneath, marbled edges, and a watercolor painted edge:
[00:26:11] The marbled river book cover by Celestial Sphere Press!
[00:29:08] ArmoredSuperHeavy’s original fanbinding guide.
[00:31:17] Binderary 2024!
[00:38:36] That was episode 211, “The Copyright Conundrum.”
[00:42:24] The award winning “Pringles can book” a dos-à-dos binding by Starblight bindery.
[00:43:32] Celestial Sphere Press’s Witcher fanbinding:
And her one of her Jedi-inspired Star Wars bindings:
[00:49:05] Duo bookcloth examples: Skarabaus Duo by Morning Star Bindery, or purple and saffron by Robins Egg Bindery.
[00:52:06] The library at the Renegade meet-up last year:
[00:53:55] The tiny binds of “My Immortal” (plus two full-sized copies), ready to be handed out at the Renegade Retreat:
[00:58:45] Flourish has now been in the Renegade Discord for a week and reports that there is “Big Trans Handy Ma’am Energy” (HUGE COMPLIMENT!!!).
[01:06:25]
[01:07:47]
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #217, “Fanbinding!”
FK: Yesss, an episode that I have been excited to do for a long time!
ELM: All right. So, very quick definition, if you haven’t encountered fanbinding: it is people taking fanfiction, printing it out, and binding it in a book. I don’t know why I said that like it was gonna be some elaborate… [both laugh]
FK: Well, because this is something that I think that, you know, people, some people will have encountered and be very familiar with, and some people probably will never have encountered, because the nature of it is to, like, make physical objects that are not necessarily… You know, you just may never have encountered it.
ELM: I think that if you are active on Tumblr and you are in f—um, a fanfiction fandom right now, you will have seen some of this, because those posts are popular. But I think on other social media platforms, it might be hard, you might need to specifically be following certain sorts of people to see.
FK: Right, or you might not realize that there was a name for this. [laughs]
ELM: Yes.
FK: I’ve definitely, like, before I knew the term “fanbinding” I’d definitely seen individual projects and been like, “Oh wow, that’s so cool.” But didn’t know that there was this whole culture, and that is what we’re going to get to hear about. [laughs]
ELM: Right. So, speaking of culture, we do have a guest, it’s not just us talking. So, once again, I hope people don’t mind that I’m doing this every single time I write an article, [FK laughs] but I’ve written an article for my Atlas Obscura column about fanbinding, and specifically about the Renegade Bindery, a collective of people who share tips about binding, and run workshops, run events, that kind of thing, just kind of this…open collaboration. And I talked to a bunch of people, and one of them in particular, Tiffo, who people may recognize from our credits for a long time, [both laugh] I immediately did, thank you Tiffo.
FK: Yeah, a person who I only knew by name in the credits, and then I was like, “Tiffo?” [ELM laughs] “Is it The Tiffo? It’s The Tiffo.” [laughs]
ELM: The Tiffo. Who binds as Fanboundbooks, and they agreed to come and be the spokesperson for Renegade Bindery and to kind of talk about the process, and talk about the collective. And so…I’m very excited to both—I mean obviously I’ve already interviewed Tiffo in another capacity, but like—I’m very excited to talk about the actual process of binding, but also about the collective itself, which is very fandomy to me. So I think that’s super interesting.
FK: Yeah, me too, I’m always curious about the ways that, like, fandom’s particular culture of…art and sharing and gifting and information-sharing, where like, there’s a very particular texture to a certain kind of fandom, that I think this is… I don’t know, I’m, I’m excited to talk about it and hear about it [ELM laughs] because I’m always excited to find bits of fandom that do this stuff. So OK, I think we should just call Tiffo. [laughs]
ELM: [laughing] All right, let's, let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, it’s time to welcome Fanboundbooks to the podcast! We’re so happy to have you!
Tiffo/Fanboundbooks: Hi, thanks for having me, so much.
ELM: OK, we are both extremely excited to talk about this topic, and so I think we should start at the most obvious place, which is… What is fanbinding? [FK laughs] Duh duh dunnnnn.
TFB: Basics. Uh, so…most simply, fanbinding is taking some kind of fannish or community work, and turning it into a book. Often what you’ll find is people who take fanfiction from AO3, Fanfiction.net, various sources online, or people will sometimes do meta, like Tumblr metas, or…other kinds of documents. But basically it’s a, it’s an independently made book.
FK: Like a, like a physical object.
TFB: Yes, a physical book that you hold in your hand that has sheets of paper that came from trees in it.
ELM: Well, and like, covers, it’s not just people printing out a…
TFB: This is, this is, this is the upgrade from when you were a kid and you were printing out fanfiction and putting it in a three-ring binder. Now you get to turn it into an actual hard-cased, typically, book. Yeah, I’ll try not to use too many bookbinding terms, but yes. So, a hardback book, which is, you know, has a hard case on it, it’s not a, it’s not a paperback.
ELM: Look, if you define book terms, I am certain our listeners would be very happy to hear book words.
FK: [overlapping] I…yeah.
ELM: I would put money on that.
FK: Yeah.
TFB: Yes, so you use book board, or binder’s board, to typically build the case for your book.
FK: OK, so then, but then you have like a…singular object, which you love and touch and call it squishy…
TFB: Mmm hmmm.
FK: You sell it to somebody…you…[ELM laughs]
TFB: No.
FK: You give it to somebody, you…
TFB: Yes…
FK: You send it around [ELM laughs] like, do they cycle to people? How do people actually get their hands on these things, because I—you know, I see, sometimes I see these objects on Instagram and I’m like, “Oh, that’s so shiny and pretty!” And then I’m like, “Oh, but I can never have it,” and also like, “I can’t even touch it or look through it,” right? [laughs]
TFB: Yeah! So, a lot of people bind purely for themselves, where they take the fics that they love and, you know, they wanna make a hard copy of it, and they wanna keep it forever, and so yeah, it just lives in their house with them, and it doesn’t go anywhere else.
A lot of people also love to make author’s copies, whether it’s for fic or even some people do it with, like a rebind for, especially independent authors. In which case you’re helping them to get a copy of their book, and then yeah, you just mail it to them. We’ve had books—I mean, our group is all over the world, and we have had books shipped all over the place. You know, even to countries, from countries to countries that were not allowed to ship to each other, and we helped do a daisy chain of shipping to different countries so that eventually that book could make it to its home and its author.
FK: Wait, what countries are not allowed to ship to each other? I guess—of course there are, [ELM laughs] but I, sorry, I’m just so…sorry, I guess you probably can’t say which ones, because you don’t want people to know that you—
ELM: [overlapping] International shipping drama. [laughs]
FK: I just like, I’m sorry, this is just like, blowing my mind here. I guess it’s…
TFB: The international shipping tea is hot. [ELM and FK laugh] But no, they…yeah, it’s, there are countries that obviously don’t get along with each other, so apparently—and I personally too wasn’t aware of this until the person who was trying to get their book to their author was like, “I can’t ship it, I try to put in the tracking and it says you can’t ship to there.” So we had to end up finding out other people in different countries who would be willing to take on the task of, “You can ship it to me, and then my country is not blocked to ship to this country, so I can ship it to there,” and then it eventually got where it was supposed to go. But that’s what I love about Renegade, is it’s a community and people find ways…community is very, the community of Renegade is very life-finds-a-way.
ELM: OK, we wanna talk about Renegade as a group, but first I kind of wanna talk about you as a fanbinder. Because I think you started binding yourself before you even knew about the group’s existence, right?
TFB: I did, that’s correct. I bound my first couple books, and then said, “Surely someone also has thought of this idea, where are they?” And then my first thought was, “Tumblr. I’d better go find them on Tumblr.” [ELM and FK laugh] And it worked!
So, that’s how I found Renegade. But so, I got started because I’d been involved in fandom for a number of years, since the 90s basically, off and on, but I’d been writing and interacting with folks, and then as I got older, I also started volunteering with, like, writers’ leagues for non-fandom purposes, right, so I was involved with people writing in fandom but then I eventually got involved with people writing outside of fandom.
The thing I was finding was that the only difference between the writers I was meeting in fandom and the writers I was meeting outside of fandom was that eventually the writers outside of fandom got to walk to up to me and say, “Look at my book.” And get really excited, and have you sign it, and get to interact with them, because their story was now a book.
And I was like, “Why can’t these guys do this too, why don’t fic writers get to have their books?” I love fic, and it’s really hard for me to think about the fact that they don’t get to have that. So I thought, “Too bad they can’t have books!” and then sat on that idea for like, five years, and then was like, “Wait, why can’t they—why can’t they have books?” [ELM and FK laugh]
So then I started, I think a friend actually sent me a video on Tumblr of someone making a personally made journal. You know? So it wasn’t a fanbinding, it was just, “Hey, I made this book!” and I was like, “Oh my God, you can make books.” [ELM and FK laugh] Like, you don’t have to be a company!
ELM: [overlapping] Someone does it! [laughs]
TFB: Yeah! Of course! Yeah, so I started looking up information and trying to find instructional videos, and folks on YouTube, or I bought some books about how to make books, and I did that, and then yeah, I made books. For my first two books, for two different anthologies of Doctor Who fic for my best friend, and I wanted to make her a birthday present, and I was like, “I’m planning way ahead!” And I spent about six months prepping and learning how to make books, so I could make her these books, and made them, got them done, got them shipped to her…now would tell you that I made many mistakes, but I know that they are loved. And so that’s what really matters.
FK: I won’t say that’s the best birthday present ever, because that was Elizabeth writing me…
ELM: Wow. Wow.
FK: Reylo fic, but—
ELM: I’ll take it.
FK: It’s really close.
TFB: Which would only be better if… [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: If only I had bound it, too.
FK: Uh, I mean, I don’t know, between you and me I think I’m the more likely one to take up fanbinding.
ELM: Yes.
FK: So maybe someday I will fanbind the thing you wrote for me and give it back to you and you’ll be like, “But I don’t ship this,” and I’ll be like, “Nevermind.” [ELM and FK laugh] “Just, just look at the object, it’s a sculpture.”
TFB: It gets to live on your desk, or on your shelf, or whatever.
ELM: I mean, please know, I don’t know if we’ve ever said on the podcast, but I did delivery it to you on a Kylo Ren-shaped USB drive.
FK: Which I, which I still have dedicated only to your fic, hanging up in a little shrine.
ELM: Oh, if you put anything else on that guy I’d be pretty mad. Unless it was like…
FK: [overlapping] Good.
ELM: I went to like, I went to the Office Max in, like, Latham, New York to acquire this item.
FK: [overlapping] You told me about this, didn’t you involve your mother in the process of finding this?
ELM: Oh yeah, I went to the mall to look for something to put it on. [FK laughs] I went to Spencer’s Gifts, all right? [FK still laughing] Which is, lemme tell you, exactly the same as it was in 1999.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Smells, smells exactly the same.
FK: Oh…oh…
ELM: I actually found it kinda, I was like, “Oh, this is charming actually.” [laughs]
TFB: The same fog machines and like, crazy lights in the corner are still goin’ off.
ELM: [overlapping] And the lava lamps.
FK: I’m now no longer embarrassed by the existence of vibrators in the store. [laughs]
ELM: No, a lot of…yeah.
TFB: [overlapping] Right, now you’re like, “Oh, I know what that is.”
ELM: [overlapping] It was actually reassuring, it’s like, have you ever gone to a Claire’s? Recently?
FK: [overlapping] Oh yes. Yes.
ELM: [overlapping] And you’re like, “Oh, this…it’s exactly the same items.” Right? It’s like…
TFB: Yeah, it’s a time capsule.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: I will, these are going to turn green and cruddy in the same way that every pair of earrings that I ever owned prior to the age of 25 did.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. But you’re like…I’m in Spencer’s and I’m like, “Oh, 13-year-old boys are the same in any era, that’s so reassuring.” [FK laughs] Anyway, sorry.
FK: OK OK OK. Your fanbinding…
TFB: [overlapping] There’s more anime stuff in there now though.
ELM: I did also go to Hot Topic and I was really astounded at the, like, fandomy merch. You know?
FK: I feel like that, that…
TFB: Hot Topic has really moved into fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I feel like that changed sometime in like, the 2000s actually, like by 2008 or so.
TFB: [overlapping] Twilight.
ELM: [overlapping] It changed after I stopped going to Hot Topic in my rounds in the mall. [laughs] Which is something I used to do.
FK: Right. I went to Hot Topic…I went to Hot Topic to buy fandom merch, I think, at some point in the late 2000s.
ELM: OK, yeah. Yeah. All right.
FK: So I know that it had made the turn by then.
ELM: [overlapping] I like that we, we all tried to end this digression and then we just kept going. [FK laughs] As a group. Pull it in. Pull it in. Pull it in.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] OK, we’re, we’re really pulling it together now though. OK. Fanbinding. So after you learned the mistakes that you made…
ELM: And you made this—
FK: Then you made more books. And you made different mistakes.
ELM: [overlapping] Beautiful…book for your friend.
TFB: [overlapping] And then you make more mistakes that are new and more interesting to learn, I just made a mistake last week, I had to…steam a book to de-case it because I realized I had messed up casing it in. And this was, you know, four years into my doing this.
ELM: Wait, so, all right, I have book questions. What does “casing it in” mean, can you…break this down?
TFB: So…when you build a book, uh… OK, let’s go through the fanbinding itself, process, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
TFB: So, you find your fic on AO3, and you’re like, “I love this, it makes me weep, I need to have it.”
ELM: Sure.
TFB: And then you…download it—so a lot of folks will download either the HTML file, or even just copy-paste it from the website, it depends on what, you know, how your computer wants to behave itself. And your preferences. All of this also, caveat, is all preferences, right? There’s more than one way to make a book.
And then you use, often, something to typeset it. So you can use—it can be so easy to get into fanbinding—you can use Google Docs. Word. You wanna get a little bit fancier, you can, if you already have Word, you probably have actually therefore access to Microsoft Publisher. You can use that. You can use Affinity Publisher. If you wanna get really fancy, and by fancy I mean expensive, you can use Adobe.
So you wanna use that to typeset your actual work, and make it look like a book, right? And then you can get as fancy or as not fancy as you want with that. And then a lot of folks have learned what kind of, in theory, the industry standards are, so like, you don’t double space in a book, you single space. You don’t put a paragraph break this way, or you, you know, you don’t indent the first line after a scene break when you’re doing—you know, but these are all things, I mean that’s something that someone literally said in a workshop last week and we had people in our channel losing their mind of, “I’ve made a hundred books and I’ve done them all wrong because I didn’t know I was supposed to do that!” But the short answer is, that’s not wrong, right? It’s just, you chose to do it a different way.
But yeah, so now you’ve got your digital file, it’s ready to go, maybe you added some various flourishes, you’ve got pictures, or whatnot in your story. You then have to print it. So depending on what program you’re using, some of them have booklet printing, in which case you can print what’s called a signature at a time, so you’re basically…what it does is a thing called imposition, and what it’s doing when it’s imposing, is it is making it so that the pages, once they are folded and in an actual book form, are in the correct number order. It’s not gonna print page one, two, three, four, because they’re on the fronts and backs of various pages.
If you do not have something that can print in booklet, or you’re not comfortable printing in booklet, you can save it as a straight PDF, 1-450 pages, and then you can use an imposer—so like, Renegade actually has a community-built imposer software that’s on GitHub, that folks can access, and they just upload their PDF, you say how many paper pages you want each signature to be, so like I typically do a 20 book-page signature, which would mean 5 pages of paper. If you use that system, it will therefore take all that information you have, you say I want them to be five pages per signature, and I want it to do this, and you know, my printer prints on duplex, or it doesn’t print duplex, and all of these options, and then you click the OK button and it creates your signatures digitally. So now it has broken your story up into pieces that will print appropriately for you.
And then you print! And you can use laser, you can use inkjet, you, you know, if you have a printer at home, great, if you don’t you could use Staples—you know, the individual one, don’t use their processing system because they get grumpy.
ELM: How many—sorry to interrupt, but how many fanbinders don’t own a—it seems like owning a printer probably is… I don’t know. Having to have to go to—
TFB: It is a hot topic of conversation, absolutely. Yes.
ELM: Interesting. because like, I’ve had to go to FedEx to print some stuff out, and uh, it’s not cheap.
TFB: No.
FK: And it’s not fun.
ELM: [overlapping] And it’s not fun.
FK: And the people who work there are not…
ELM: Loving their jobs? I would not say.
FK: Yeah, I mean…I wouldn’t love that job either, so like.
ELM: [overlapping] Nope. Me neither.
TFB: No.
FK: I’m not, you know, I’m not judging them for doing the bare minimum, but…
TFB: Sure. They’re working retail, we know what’s happening.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I’ve done it.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
TFB: Yeah, I do not have a percentage. I don’t…you know, we do a yearly statistics, and I don’t know if we ask, “Do you have a printer.”
ELM: I mean I guess if you’re a student, or you know, if you have access to—or like, I used to work at a magazine, obviously I could print, I did print thousands of pages a day, and you could slip in a few of your own. Don’t tell David Remnick. [FK laughs]
TFB: You find yourself access to a printer. Your local library may have a printer.
ELM: That’s true.
FK: I’m sure there are many people who are doing the classic zine thing of stickin’ it to the man by printing it at their work, and I support this, this is a long and beloved tradition, like David Remnick, you were supporting a long, beloved tradition when Elizabeth was printing her two or three pages.
ELM: [laughing] Don’t, don’t, don’t invoke him again… [ELM and FK laugh]
TFB: But yeah! So, not everybody has a printer, actually often I would say it’s fairly… I would probably be surprised by how many people don’t…
ELM: Interesting.
TFB: Have a personal printer. And especially because personal printers…well, can be very not good, right? Everyone’s out here—talkin’ about you, HP [ELM and FK laugh]—and just, HP, I wouldn’t call it slander because it’s true, but a lot of HP hate in the chat, for us. Brother and Epson, we hear you, we love you.
FK: Yeah, and inkjet is expensive, and if—excuse me, inkjet is expensive for the cartridges, but laser is expensive for the printer, and like…
TFB: Right, but if you have an inkjet well printer, it’s actually cheaper than having a laser printer.
FK: Right.
TFB: So that’s what I have. But the other thing is, therefore it’s inkjet. So if my book got wet—which would be a problem for many reasons—but if my book would get wet, there’s a chance that it just goes bye bye, words! There’s no words there!
FK: Right.
TFB: And you can do really cool things. There’s toner-reactive foil, so if you have a laser printer and you print with toner instead of ink, you can then later do a process where you can foil those letters, and I know people obviously who have done that, and they make amazing things. I’m gonna, yeah.
ELM: Wow, the look on Flourish’s face, Flourish, you’re gonna start binding fic by the end of this episode, I can tell, I can see it in your eyes.
FK: [overlapping] I…I…it’s because…[laughs] It’s because I have, it’s because I have a laser printer, and it didn’t occur to me that I could put foil on things using my laser printer. And foil is shiny and I like foil. [laughs]
TFB: Yes, yes. Bookbinding, it—listen, it can be so inexpensive, and so easy to get into bookbinding. It is so expensive to make a book. [all laugh] You will fall down that rabbit hole. I…
FK: High ceiling, low floor problem?
TFB: Yeah, I definitely spent $140 on paper. Like, fancy paper to use for a book, and not even like, you know, printer paper. And I do have four or five different kinds of printer paper just for books, that are different weights, and different colors, and different…
FK: I can imagine that if you get into, like, the issue of getting a nice hand-marbled paper for your endpapers or whatever, then that—I mean because realistically…
TFB: Fifteen dollars a sheet just for that paper!
ELM: Sure. OK, wait—
FK: [overlapping] Right, right, because realistically you’re not marbling that yourself…
TFB: [overlapping] We’re going so far, OK.
ELM: All right, no, but we were—all right, so we printed out our pages, [FK laughs] and now you have to make the cover? And I guess the endpages too, right?
TFB: Right, so printing the paper, we’re gonna fold it into each signature, and then we’re gonna punch holes in those signatures in order to sew them together. Because most of us make sewn books. And again—sorry, what I’m describing is how to make a hard casebound book.
ELM: Sure.
TFB: A flat back, casebound book. There’s so many ways to make a book, and so this, there are many different styles. But what I’ll do is just kinda, your basic flat-back casebound book. So, you, you’ve folded it, now you’re ready to sew it, you could sew it either with or without book tapes, it depends on what style of sewing you’re using…
ELM: What’s a book tape?
TFB: It is a strip of, like, cloth tape that is used—so if you ever open a book and you see like, underneath the endpage, on the inside cover of the book, you see a weird little spot that’s kind of sticking up in like, two rows? Two lines? [ELM and FK both make sounds of recognition] Those are the tapes. So that’s just, it’s to help hold the book together.
And then you can sew it in multiple styles. French stitch, Coptic stitch, various other ones. It depends on what you wanna do. Some you use tapes for, some you do not use tapes for. Now you have a text block.
ELM: I like that you’re—
FK: [overlapping] Now you have a text block.
ELM: You’re givin’ us a visual for our podcast.
TFB: [overlapping] I know, for a podcast, you’re welcome.
FK: [overlapping] You’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to send us pictures of these stages so that we can put it in the notes, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Oh yeah, oh yeah. Please.
FK: So, so if you’re listening to this, go look at the show notes and see a picture of what a text block is.
ELM: So what we’re looking at is a very naked book right now, it’s like a wad of paper and then it’s got like, it’s sewn together at the, at the, where the spine will be.
FK: Naked is a great description of it.
ELM: [overlapping] It looks so naked! It’s nude!
FK: [overlapping] It looks like… [ELM and FK laugh] It looks, it is nude.
TFB: [overlapping] It is! This one is also truly nude because it doesn’t even have endpages on it. This is just the text of the story.
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: So you’ve got your text block, you’ve sewn it together. Then you’re gonna glue that along the spine to help make your spine, and the spine is the inside back of the book. Then you’re going to…add endpages, so that’s where you put in your fancy paper, and you’re gonna add that, you’re gonna add a folded in half endpage to the front, folded in half endpage to the back, and the endpages, once you case in the book, are what attaches the text block to the case of the book.
So now you have your endpages on your book, now you can decide whether or not you’re being fancy about, are you trimming the paper to make it look a, you know, to be flat and smooth? Are you trimming it to have a, what’s called a deckled edge, which is where it’s like, just a little bit ripped on every single page, so it’s a little always off and not smooth. Are you adding endbands, or headbands, they’re called either, that’s the little piece of…color cloth, it almost looks like thread, that you’ll see at the top and the bottom of the book.
FK: That’s what those are called!
TFB: Either endbands or headbands, depends on who you talk to.
ELM: I feel like we’re, like…we’re learning about our friend, like all the little parts of our friend, like, “A book? Oh, I know those! I know those!”
FK: [overlapping] I’m literally, I’m literally looking at a book right now being like, “Ah!”
ELM: You’re like, “I know a book!” [laughs]
TFB: This is why it’s so addicting, because it’s like a little fun puzzle you get to create every single time, and all of us—you know, we all are like, “I wanna make books because I love this fanfiction and I want it,” and then you become obsessed with the process of making the book, and that becomes really fun.
ELM: [overlapping] You’re like, in the book fandom. The actual material, yeah.
TFB: We actually, we are, a lot of people now follow just, like, book makers that have nothing to do with…
ELM: I love it.
TFB: Because we’re now in book-making fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: And then with headbands, or endbands, you can buy premade ones and you just glue them on, you can sew your own. If you sew your own, what kind of style do you wanna do? Islamic? Do you wanna do standard one-bead? Three-bead? Four colors? French double-core? You get to pick which one you love, and there, and you literally with a needle go in and sew this…it’s a, usually you have some kind of core material, and you’re wrapping thread around it, and the different names I gave were all different styles of how you wrap it. And there’s various other ones, too.
Then you’ve got to decide, you could paint your edges, some people do designs on the edges, the fore edges of their books, some people gild it, which is literally just making it pretty…that’s not the technical way of saying it, but if people are wondering what I’m talking about, does it have shiny foil [ELM and FK laugh] or paint on the edge of your book? It’s been gilded! You do that to help also kind of protect the pages, it looks nice, if someone wants to do a hidden fore edge painting, where you tilt the pages a little bit, you press ’em and then all of a sudden there’s an image there, right?
We have someone who’s really good and just did a class on that, and you wanna gild those, because you have to cover that painting, right, because when it’s not being pressed out to look at, it’ll just be this weird compressed version of the painting on the edges of the paper, so then you gild that and you can’t see it. But because it is technically slightly on a different spot of the paper, it doesn’t cover the actual picture, and when you open the book and fold the pages over again, that image comes right back out and you can see it. It’s really fun. [ELM laughs]
So you’ve decided what kind of fancy things you wanna do. Then you have to build the case, which is the end—again, there are so many ways, I’m picking one. This is how you do a plain flat back case, you cut pieces of book board into the size that you need, it’s based on the size of your text block obviously. You glue those to a bookcloth. You wanna use always at least some kind of bookcloth or leather for the spine, for sure, some people do a full case where it’s just bookcloth all around, and then you add embellishments, sometimes you can do various styles, maybe your bookcloth only comes an inch or an inch and a half over on either side, front and back of the book…
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeahhh! Riiight… [ELM laughs]
TFB: …and then you have maybe a paper or a different cloth, another section of the book. Uh…you might do corners, where you do the, those have book cloth, you know, sometimes—and then you can get fancy with how you do that, you know, I have a friend who cut multiple layers of book board, then what they did with it was they built those up on the cover so that they look like a river, and put a piece of marbled paper in that river section, and then covered all of it with bookcloth to case it all in, and so it’s indented, and is a different, you know, color and pattern.
You can do so many things to design your cover, and then yes, you can use various accessories to do your titling and/or whatever imagery you wanna have on the covers. So, people use vinyl, they might buy a Cricut or a Silhouette or some other kind of cutting machine to help them cut those things, people might use paint pens, or foil, or, I used an airbrush a couple—on my last book.
ELM: And so then you, and then you have your book, and then you send it to the author.
TFB: Yeah, so once you’ve cased it in, which is just gluing it [claps] into the actual case, then you press—to press it in a book press so that it behaves itself.
ELM: [overlapping, sotto voce] Oh, a book press…
TFB: [overlapping] And doesn’t curl, or, yeah. That’s what all of these things behind me are.
ELM: So is that something that you need to buy, or is that something you could also, like kind of hack?
TFB: You could make.
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: Yes, absolutely. You can hack all of this. No…
FK: So I, I’m, can you just, like, put other heavy books on top of your book so that you have a book that is pressed by books?
ELM: Pressin’.
TFB: Yep.
ELM: Pressin’.
FK: Yeahhh.
ELM: So, you learned some of this just by tutorials, but because I’ve already interviewed you for the article I know that not long after you started binding, you found Renegade. And so…
TFB: Yes.
ELM: I’m wondering if you wanna, now’s the time to talk about it and also…to talk about you finding it and also talk about it in general. Like, just to talk about the origin of it.
TFB: I’m here to talk about Renegade, I’m excited.
ELM: Hook me up.
TFB: Yeah, so, I found it on Tumblr, like I said, and I…was looking for folks who make books, and I just typed in, you know, “fanbinding,” “fanfiction bookbinding” in tags to see what I could find, and I immediately fell into finding the Renegade Tumblr, and on the Renegade Tumblr there’s a link that’s like, “Join our Discord, we wanna talk about books with you!” And so that’s what I did, in March of 2021.
And to give you a, the back-date of what had happened up until the point of my joining, was so… Go way, way back: 2016, ArmoredSuperHeavy is a person online and on Tumblr who wants to make books, he likes to read kind of independently made books and fanfiction, and has this idea of, “I wish this could be a book.”
So, he looks into “how do I make books,” struggling to kind of find tutorials and information, but what he does find, he ends up compiling into a document for his own use, to, it’s like a, you know, my how-to that I use whenever I make a book. And decides eventually he wants to share this with other people, posts it online, and it kinda starts making the rounds of folks finding it and using it. He called it “I’m a Guerilla Publisher” and it’s still available, it’s actually on the web, the Renegade website now if people wanna use it, it’s a great kind of bookbinding 101, how do you do—he came up with a lot of his own tools, you were asking about if you can use your own thing. He wasn’t buying fancy tools. He was just making, you know, a butter knife sometimes.
The point is, because he did that, folks started reaching out to him to say, “I wanna make a book, how do I make a book,” or “I have questions about this part or that part.” And eventually it got bandied around amongst the people who were talking to him, that was like, “Why don’t you make a Discord so we can all talk to each other, instead of you having to keep dealing with all these individual messages.” And so they did, and that was the beginning, that was June of 2020, and Renegade started with about 20ish people in that first week, and we have…we’re at 2,900 and something, as of this morning?
FK: 2,000??
ELM: Almost 3,000.
TFB: Yeah, almost 3,000.
ELM: Rounding up for you, Flourish, 2,900. [laughs]
FK: Woooow.
TFB: And we’ve done purges, so we don’t, you know, if folks don’t…aren’t active for a while, so this is, kind of even curated numbers. It’s not just folks who have joined and then disappeared for two years. We do, we do try to keep making sure that folks who are around are active in some way, so that we know the community is doing well and flourishing.
Created it in June of 2020, and it’s grown since then, and then we have since then, like I said, become a group of folks that are really focused on fanbinding in particular, but bookbinding in general, community, and education, and sharing that with folks. We try to make sure that, you know, we have a variety of resources, and of course just the, obviously—obviously if you put a question in the chat of, “How do I make whatever,” and 3,000 people come back at you saying…somebody knows how to do that, [ELM and FK laugh] and they’re excited to get to tell you about it. [FK laughs]
FK: [laughs] I love this.
TFB: It’s glorious.
ELM: So, you’ve referenced a couple times, like, are there workshops, and classes?
TFB: Yes! So right now actually, in February, is Binderary which is an event that we made up to be similar to NaNoWriMo or Inktober, where it’s supposed to be, you know, a month where you focus on a certain skill. And for this month, we wanted it to be bookbinding, and, somewhat different from the two of them, the other two programs I mentioned, we do not have a set, you know, you don’t have to make so many certain books, you don’t have to, we let everybody set their own goals for Binderary. We have some that are like, listed as encouragement, it’s like, “If you’ve never made a book, make your first book in this month!” “If you’re new to making books but you wanna get started, set yourself a goal of one book a week. Set yourself a goal of one book a day!”
ELM: Wow! That’s pretty fast. [ELM and FK laugh]
TFB: Our top Binderary performer last year…performer. [TFB and ELM laugh] Our top Binderary creator last year made sixty books in the month.
FK: Sixty!
ELM: That’s so many books!
FK: I mean, I guess I can see that though, particularly if they were relatively simple compared to, like, your super gilded whatever, right? They could still be beautiful objects and not be like…
TFB: [overlapping] Sure. And some people—and you know, January is a big, people like to talk about what they’re prepping for Binderary. So a lot of times people might typeset or something in January, and they’ll like…
FK & ELM: Ahhh.
TFB: We also do a Renegade exchange, which is similar to a fic writing exchange, but instead of writing a fic, what you do is you send…you sign up, and you send in your list of your favorite three to five fics, and you get matched up with someone and they get sent your list, and it’s your job then as the creator to reach out to the authors to make sure that they’re OK with you binding their work, but then you make that book and you send it to the person who was your giftee.
We have that exchange set up so that it happens starting in the fall, and ends in early to mid-January, and then another part of the exchange is since all of these fics are ones we know we have author permission to create, because that’s part of the requirements for Binderary—or, for the exchange, we can then also, anyone who participated in that exchange gets a list of all the fics that were made and they get to see, we do like a slideshow of a couple pages from each one, so you see what it looks like.
And then we have our database that you can go in and say, “Hi, I would like a copy of that typeset, I would like a copy of that typeset.” And so a lot of folks use that, that mass, that glut of typesets that come in the middle of January, and then they just, for February they’re like, “I got 50 new books I can print, let’s go! And I’m gonna make ’em!”
FK: Wait so this is something I’m curious about, is part of the, like, ethos of this that you only bind things with permission by the author, even if it—because it sounds like a lot of this is for people’s personal use. But at the same time I can see that, I’m sure, if somebody—no one’s gonna do this with my fic—but if somebody did this with my fic, then I could imagine being like…
ELM: [overlapping] You never know, Flourish… Wow.
TFB: [overlapping] That sounds like a challenge now. Elizabeth, you need to tell me…
ELM: [overlapping] I do know Flourish’s pseud.
TFB: The pen name.
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: Let’s go.
FK: OK, actually it’s not totally out of the question with one of my fics that it could possibly happen. Point being, that uh… [ELM laughs] if it happened and no one talked to me, I could imagine being, like, really excited but then also feeling weird about it, [laughing] especially if they didn’t send me a copy. You know? So like, what’s the, what’s the vibes around that?
TFB: Obviously with 3,000 and more people, everyone has their own opinion, [FK and ELM laugh] and so this is my opinion, I’ll take off my Renegade hat for a second.
FK: It’s not, there’s not a single community norm.
TFB: There’s…like you said, an ethos. So we do have a general vibe of what Renegade—like Elizabeth said, Renegade is very interested in the gift economy, and so we bind because we love fic and we love the stories that were made for us and we know that they were made out of the kindness of someone’s heart and the love and the passion that they feel for that thing, and they’re not making money, and they’re spending all of their time, and we wanna find a way to say “I love this thing, I also love physical books, and so I wanna keep it.”
But also it’s a way of kind of giving that back, right? You know, you write fic for each other, you do things, this is just, to us, another way of expressing that, you know, this is really important and we think it’s both valid as a form of media and literature, and also it’s a way we can show that to especially the author. Right? We can say “Hey, this was important enough that I wanted to make it.”
And so it depends, to get to your question, it depends on whether you’re making it for yourself, whether you’re making it for something else. So because the exchange is something that we know is going to be given from one person to another, and is going to be something that we would like to be able to share the typeset of, and is something that will probably be shared on social media, because of that, for the exchange it is required to have author permission. To the point where you have to give, part of the, one of the things that the exchange mods do is we have a form that they will collect your screenshots from the author, that says, “Yes. You’re allowed to make this.”
Because we just wanna make sure that, yeah, everyone is being like, everyone’s work is respected. The point of doing this is to show how much we love something. If it makes the author uncomfortable, then that’s not showing… [laughs] That’s not the vibe that we were going for. But if you’re making a book for yourself, some people ask, and if the author says no, then they maybe might not, but…some people don’t. It’s, it’s up—that’s your personal, what’s in your house, nobody knows what’s in your house. [FK laughs]
ELM: Right, and nothing’s stopping you from, obviously there’s a download button on the AO3, obviously people are printing out stories.
TFB: Right.
ELM: People have—you know, you referenced earlier, back in the day, printing out fic and putting it in your binder or whatever, but like, people have always done that if they can’t really read that much on screen, you know what I mean? There’s lots of reasons why you would always do that.
TFB: Sure.
ELM: And I’ll never know if anyone’s ever printed out anything I’ve written.
TFB: Yeah. So, I personally like to reach out and ask the author…well, I also will a lot of times, because I’m doing it for a thing—so another event we do is for Fanfiction Writer Appreciation Day, which is August 21st every year, so Renegade has—
FK: [laughs] This is news to me.
ELM: [simultaneous] Didn’t know that. Didn’t know that.
FK: [overlapping] I didn’t know there was a day!
TFB: [overlapping] You didn’t know this existed? Elizabeth, you’re on Tumblr! I don’t—OK.
ELM: No, there’s, International Fanworks Day, the OTW’s always goin’ on about that.
TFB: And that is in February, and unfortunately we do not yet have an event associated with that other than the fact that Binderary itself also exists in February, but we would love to do something.
But Fanfiction Writer Appreciation Day is a holiday that exists, every year, I started, I found out about it in 2015, 2016, and yeah, it’s basically supposed to be a day where you show the love to fanfic writers, and posts and stuff you’ll see on Tumblr will often say things like, “Make a comment on your favorite fic that day, go give kudos on your favorite fics that day, do something.” I’ve also worked in fandom communities where we would do, that would be like, the day we’d post our master fic rec list. So, “We’ve been reccing things variously throughout the year, here’s our Fanfiction Writer Appreciation Day fanfic list.”
It was kind of, to me anyway, a no-brainer that that should be a holiday that we as fanbinders celebrate, and so we came up with Renegade Loves Fic (Writers), and it is an event where you pick a fic that is your favorite, you reach out to that author and say “Hey man, I wanna make you a book, because I appreciate you.” And that’s how it—I mean, it’s, [laughing] it’s so funny to me to describe it, because I’m like, “That’s it. That’s what you do.”
FK: I, it doesn’t need more, I cannot imagine—I mean, even though I just said like, “I don’t know how I would feel if somebody bound it and put it on social media and didn’t give it to me,” I can tell you what, if someone sent me a book? [laughing] Of a fic I’d read? I think I would die! Right? Of a fic I’d written? What would you do? [laughs]
TFB: [overlapping] Yeah, I mean, you just…and we have, when you sign up, we even have like, you know, we have information about the, when we think timeline-wise you should probably be in each step, to try to make sure—because the goal is to get the books done and mailed so that they are all arrived to the authors by August 21st.
FK: Right.
TFB: And then on August 21st, everyone gets to post on their own personal social medias or whatnot, of, “Here’s my—” You know, and then we just have a hashtag for each year of “Here’s my fanfiction, my FWAD book for this year.” And uh…yeah, last year was our second year doing it, and we gave a hundred books around the world.
FK: A hundred!
ELM: That’s so lovely. I’m wondering if you could talk more about the gift economy element. Because I know this is, like, a big part of it, and you know, we mentioned—I mentioned, wait was it me? It was me. I mentioned when we had EarlGreyTea on, to talk about copyright, about how like…you know, technically…I mean obviously this is with author permission or whatever, but technically of anything violating a copyright, this is literally you’re making a copy. Right? [FK laughs] You know, this is like, going back to the—
FK: [laughs] You’re making a—did you do that, “you’re making a copy, right?” intentionally?
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, nope, but now I did. [FK laughs] Just imagine that’s my wordplay, I’m a wordsmith, actually, so.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. That’s right.
TFB: It is your right.
FK: You’re basically a rapper.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, thank you. But you know, it’s literally going back to the very beginning of why copyright existed, was to, like, to stop physical copies being made, right? Obviously this is not…you guys, Renegade is not doing this for sale.
TFB: Absolutely.
ELM: But I’m especially interested in the, like, kind of—and I brought it up in that episode, because I’d seen all these fanbinders be like, “Gift economy, gift economy!” very aggressively, in a way I admired, for the record, and it did strike me, compared to fanartists. Which, I mean obviously we kind of swirl around that question over and over again, you know, across the years, because these are both very physical—you know, these are physical art forms, and I am really interested in those norms and how they came to be, and I wonder if it’s something…it is something about books, you know? I don’t know. I’m actually just curious, or maybe it’s just, the people involved.
TFB: I think it also plays into the fact that we are…an offshoot, or something that’s grown out of fanfiction.
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: And there are enough of us that have been in fandom long enough to remember the cease and desist days, and things like that, that making money wasn’t even a—no, of course you wouldn’t make money off of this, it wasn’t even a consideration for many of us. Because we are interested—at least for me, personally, my first thought is, I spent tens of hours building this book, you spent hundreds of hours probably writing it, you didn’t get to make any money, why do I get to make money? That just doesn’t feel right to me, personally. Like, I…and it’s not what it’s about to me. I don’t know. Yeah. It feels very circular to try to think about it in that way, but.
FK: I wonder too, and you can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I wonder also whether…you know, when I see people who, the kind of fanart that I think usually is sort of making the most money is fanart that’s being reproduced in different ways. Like, it’s not, they’re not selling the original oil painting that they did or something like that, right, they’re selling…
ELM: Mmm. Prints.
FK: They’re selling prints, they’re selling, you know. Or it’s a very quick, like a sketch on a Wacom tablet of your character or whatever. Whereas I think about like, you know, in the, in the yarn community or like, making things, if you’re knitting or crocheting something, there’s physically no way to charge somebody enough money to pay you back for the hours you’re doing of that object, right? Like I can make my little screen-accurate sweater from Knives Out, but there’s no way I will ever be able to sell that to anybody, because the yarn alone was like $300 and then I spent, like, 50 hours on it. And I feel like when you get into some…not all bookbinding maybe, but it definitely seems like there’s some forms of fanbinding where it’s like, no, this was so many hours and it required so much material and so many things, that like…it wouldn’t make sense, you couldn’t really make money from it even if you wanted to. [laughs]
TFB: Absolutely, it’s, it’s extremely cost prohibitive. Even, I would say I don’t make super fancy books, I make what I like to think of as just kind of like…middle grounds, because like I just told you guys, some people make art. Art books. And spend—
ELM: We should put some of that in the show notes, by the way. You should send us…yeah, yeah.
TFB: [overlapping] —eight months making one book. Because it’s beautiful and gilded and…you know, has half a Pringles can on it. [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah, we’re gonna put that one in the show notes.
FK: [overlapping] I feel like the Pringles can usually happens separately from the gilded, but maybe you have an example of one that has both.
TFB: ¿Por qué no los dos? [FK and ELM laugh] I feel like…
ELM: That’s right.
TFB: Obviously it deserves the gilding even more.
ELM: You know when Flourish becomes a bookbinder, a fanbinder, this is where it’s gonna wind up, you’re gonna be gilding a Pringles can.
TFB: You’re gonna knit a case for your book.
ELM: Yeah you are.
FK: I have knit cases for lots of absurd things. So, uh…
ELM: Get ready.
FK: No, if I actually, if I actually bind anything I regret to inform you guys that it will almost certainly be something embarrassing, like a book of prayers or something like that. [laughs]
ELM: All right, grandma. [laughs]
FK: So you know…
TFB: Listen, one old soul to another, we’re here for that.
FK: Yeah, we’re gonna have, we’re gonna have our own, you know, yeah, private…
TFB: For real, you would be…maybe not surprised, but, conversation about illuminated pages and medieval, and all kinds of old manuscripts, and replicating that…
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah, oh yes, absolutely.
ELM: [overlapping] Sure, sure.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
TFB: I know someone who just did a Witcher fic, and they made it look like these illuminated, gilded pages, and it’s gorgeous.
FK: Yeah, so, I have unfortunately—because this is not gonna happen anytime soon because I am having a baby and the baby is going to probably take up all of the space in my mind for a project—
TFB: The person who does those art books had a baby, made that Jedi book whilst finishing up having a child…yeah.
FK: [overlapping] While…
ELM: Look at that, Flourish, that’s a goal for you.
FK: Oh man.
TFB: Babies gotta nap sometimes.
ELM: You know, OK, all right. Flourish’s future as a fanbinder aside. I do wanna muddy the waters a little bit with this gift economy thing, because while I agree, Flourish, with what you’re saying about the like, labor amounts, right, there is a pure capitalist question of scarcity. And uniqueness, right? Like, even if you’re not recouping it, you could make money.
I think one of the reasons I find the fanbinding—like, Renegade, and the general ethos of the fanbinders so interesting, is because it would be so easy for this to hurt people’s feelings. Like, not just in the money question, right, I mean maybe it does, right, but the idea of like, you see people losing their minds because they’re not on a rec list. Right? And they’re like, “That’s elitist, making a rec list!” And maybe people feel this way. But from everything I’ve seen, people are just so touched that a work exists, that it’s not an element of jealousy. Do you know what I’m kinda saying?
TFB: I do, I do, and I think that, especially maybe as knowledge of fanbinding grows, that yes, there could be someone out there who’s like, “Aw, no one’s bound my story and I’m sad about it.”
ELM: Right.
TFB: And that’s valid, I understand, that you would be sad. I mean the other answer is, there’s how many millions of works on AO3? And while we did say there was now 3,000 of us…please know the economy of scale when you’re talking about 3,000 people…
ELM: OK, Sixty a day, I heard that’s a normal amount, wait what was it?
TFB: [laughing] Sixty a day now? I thought it was sixty a month!
ELM: [laughing] Sorry, it was sixty a month, sixty a month. OK, sixty a month, times twelve months, is…you’re the one who’s the math person.
TFB: Seven hundred and twenty.
FK: There’s literally a calculator happening at the moment.
ELM: Seven hundred twenty books a year, times three thousand people… So you’re saying that you guys, if you all committed, you could do 2 million a year, you’ll have the whole AO3 done in six years.
TFB: That’s terrifying, actually, [all laugh] to think about that…
FK: I wish this was a video podcast… [ELM laughs]
TFB: [overlapping] You don’t understand that now you’ve said that and all of Renegade go, “Oh…” [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: I mean…
FK: I really, I’m enjoying this so much, because there’s a very particular kind of nerd crafter energy, which is just…I mean, you’re exuding it [ELM and TFB laugh] from every pore. And the idea that there are 3,000 people who also exude it to this degree is so powerful. [laughs]
TFB: It is powerful, and that’s why we love having it, it’s a, honestly I’ve been in fandom for…off and on, like I said, for twenty, twenty-five years? I mean, well no, OK, when were the 90s? That was like, [high and disbelieving] thirty years ago?
ELM: The 90s were like a hundred years ago.
TFB: Late 90s, early 2000s.
ELM: That was like, twenty-five years ago…
TFB: Yeah, crap. [all laugh] But still…
FK: We’re all in the club.
TFB: I get a, I get a pass, I had a kid in the middle of that, so I get an eight-year… [ELM laughs] I was busy, I didn’t get to, I got a little pocket of freedom. But of all the times I’ve been in fandom, and it’s been great, and it’s been lovely…Renegade is, they just, they accomplish—the passion is so there, and it’s obviously there in other fandoms, but the thing I love about Renegade too is the fact that it’s multifandom. Like, finding someone who’s in your fandom—well, in 3,000 you’ll probably find someone else who ships your ship, but—and we do have our fic rec list, and it is astronomically huge at this point that it’s impossible to search.
But at the same time, that’s the thing, is…like you were saying about becoming the book fandom. That’s what happens. We’re not here—you know, so many Discords are based around a certain fandom. But this community is about the fact that we all love the idea of making books. And then we all wanna geek out about the thing that we’re making a book for, and especially again in fandom we get to like, pull in all these elements from whatever the original media or property was, and so you get to see, like, “Oh my God, yes, you picked this color because that thing did this, and that has, oh, this is in Aziraphale’s tartan.” [ELM laughs] Like, you know, these kinds of things…
And so you get to geek out about both the thing you love and the creation that you’re making, and it just compounds on itself and then everyone gets super passionate and super excited, and next thing you know, you go from, you know, twenty to hundred people to now we do ten events a year, we do in-person meetups, we have people on every continent, we have…and we’re filing to become a 501(c)(3), and you’re like, hi, that was…two years ago that we were like, “What if we did this thing and that would be really fun! We love sending books to each other.”
So…it’s amazing to get to see all these folks make all these things happen. You know, we have fifty volunteers—over fifty volunteers at this point—who run all of, all of these things. They mod the servers, we have fourteen satellite servers, which just means servers that are associated with Renegade but are typically for certain areas, you know, so there’s a California one, there’s a Texas one, there’s a Europe, there’s Asia, which is getting a little broad when you’re trying to think about having a community server, but that kind of idea, right?
But then at the same time we also have one that’s for the group buys. Which is people collaborating together to be able to do things like when Duo bookcloth, which is a type of bookcloth that is, it’s made with two different color fabrics and when you wiggle the book it changes colors, you know, think that blue-black dress, white issue. Depending on how you look at it it looks like a different color.
But when the manufacturer of that bookcloth, about a year and a half, two years ago maybe, was like, “Oops, we’re not making this anymore,” and Renegade as a whole had a collective gasp and clutching of pearls and “What will we do? [ELM laughs] This is beautiful bookcloth, how will we live?”
And so we had a group of people who ended up making a satellite server based on wanting to get a hold of that, anyone who was interested in buying Duo went to the server, all talked about it, they made a form, they tracked it, and so next thing you know we’re ordering hundreds and hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands—probably really thousands based on even just how much I spent on bookcloth—thousands of dollars to buy bolts, 100 or 200 yards of each of these fabrics that then not only do we get them, but it gets shipped to one person’s house, and then they organize having a cutting party where they’re all getting together and people are driving to their house so they can all cut to fulfill these orders of bookcloth that we’ve all made.
And then re—once again, shipping it and sending it all back around the world. You know? This all came from, we were buying cloth from Germany and other places, and it was all getting shipped to one person’s house, and then they’re going and they’re cutting it up and shipping it out to everybody, and it’s going to Australia and Japan and the U.S. and Canada, and now we all have buckets and buckets, you can’t see my dark corner over here, but know that it is full. [ELM and FK laugh] Like my crops, it is full and watered, of bookcloth and paper, and if my office ever burned down I would weep because I don’t know how much money that would be…
All of that to say that that’s what I love about being in Renegade. Related to that, with the 501(c)(3) thing, I’ve done volunteer work and I’ve been employed by various nonprofits throughout my life, and so I’ve worked with nonprofit, you know, boards, individuals, employees, volunteers. I have never seen a group so motivated and so actionable as this group.
I mean, we did an in-person meetup in a state in the middle of the country last year, where we had twenty-five people from all around the U.S. fly in and talk about fanfiction bookbinding for the weekend. We had presentations, we did classes, we collaborated with the local book arts center, so a totally different nonprofit, and we booked out so that we would have free classes that just our participants went to for those, and they all got to marble paper, or make boxes, and then everyone, you know, brought their books and laid them out and we had it—it was called the library, and you could literally check out with pieces of paper, books to read, to take back to your dorm room at night when we weren’t having things happen, and stay up all night and read fanfiction in a book. And then you’d bring it back, and you would check it back into the library when you were done, and…like you said, the energy of that space, it was chaos…in the best way.
We did an event where we, in that, where we did a round-robin bookbind, which is, so each person, everybody started a book, it was all the same book, and—I’ll tell you what it was in a second—but we all started a book, and then when you finished a step, those steps I was telling you about, you did a step and then you passed that book to someone else. So you sewed it. This person made headbands. This person made endpapers. This person built the case. And we did tiny books, so they were only about…what’s this, like, three inches tall?
It was amazing, and then at the end we had I think it was twenty-one copies of what we had made, and we put them all in a bucket, or a basket, and then we listed off each person who had been involved in it, and you know, we said “So and so!” and then you rummaged your hand in the bucket and you pull it out and you got a completely random book. And inside, it says even, we had, you could sign. So you could be like, “This book was sewn by so-and-so, this book was—”
FK: Awww!
ELM: Oh my God… [laughs]
TFB: “—the endbands were made by this person.” And you got to take that home and that was a, like a, you know, a gift from the retreat. And it was perfect, because it encapsulated everything that, you know, it was about community and collaboration, and books, and fanfiction, because what we bound was “My Immortal.” [all laugh]
FK: Oh…could not be better.
ELM: Incredible, incredible.
TFB: [overlapping] It was perfect, yes. It’s a, it’s a, a special typeset that was also done collaboratively by Renegade members a couple years back, actually, in which each person could pick a chapter—a couple people did a couple chapters—but each person could pick a chapter, and you could typeset it however you want, and you actually weren’t supposed to tell each other how you were doing it. So every single chapter is set up completely differently in its typeset, the more chaotic the better. There’s ones that look like, you know, like cutout letters as like a…
FK: [overlapping] That’s the spirit. [FK and ELM laugh]
TFB: You know, like some kind of…what am I thinking of, like, serial killer note?
ELM: Sure. Yeah.
TFB: Gilded pages, there are gilded pages, ones that are designed to look like medieval texts and things.
FK: Wow.
TFB: There are ones that are printed completely sideways, there are ones where various words are huge. It’s beautiful. And completely chaotic, and to me it’s just perfect for what encompasses the idea of fanbinding. You know, we have on our website that not every fanwork is for everyone, but every fanwork is loved by someone, and that…
ELM: Oh…
TFB: …is why it deserves the chance to be made into something else.
FK: That’s so true.
TFB: These things are important to us, it doesn’t—we don’t need society to tell us it’s worth being important. We get to decide that. And that’s one of the things that is so important to us in Renegade, is that we get the freedom to choose what we bind, and why we do it, and what it means to us and no one else gets to tell us whether or not it’s allowed to be a book. I got a copy of one of my fics from a friend in the exchange, and I wept. Like a child. [laughs]
ELM: Ohhh… [laughs]
FK: [simultaneous] Ohhh…
TFB: Even though I had made forty books by that point!
ELM: Yeah.
TFB: It didn’t matter, someone else had thought my, you know, even though it was also something I had on my list as something that could be made, but, right, so I kind of requested it…
ELM: Still.
TFB: But still, like…I didn’t know they were making it, and I didn’t think they would pick it, and they had made a different book for me actually as like, the main exchange, and I opened it and it was beautiful, they even drew me some fanart they’d put in it, it’s…glorious. And I look at it and get misty-eyed, but then I opened the second one and I was like, “Oh, what’s this one?” Because it didn’t say anything on the cover. And then I opened it up and went “Oh…this is my story!”
FK: Awwww…
ELM: OK. I think that if anyone was even remotely interested in fanbinding, I have to imagine you’ve sold them. But just to clarify, if people have zero knowledge, they can join Renegade?
TFB: Absolutely.
ELM: And start from scratch. So what should they do, should they just join the Discord? Just go to your website?
TFB: Yeah! Yeah, well, now we have a website, so you can go to our website, RenegadeGuild.org, and find out—we do have a resources page on that that has some bookbinding resources, bookbinding 101 kind of stuff on there, so you’re welcome to get started on your own, figure stuff out.
But yes, our biggest thing is, it’s an 18+ Discord, just because obviously people are talking about all kinds of stuff, depending on what they’re binding on there, so it is for 18+, but we absolutely would love for folks to join the community and join the conversation about bookbinding and get to see all the stuff that we have going on in there.
FK: Literal typing noises happening over here right now.
ELM: Are you, are you gonna go, Flourish, are you gonna join?
FK: Yes!
ELM: I love it. No, I mean, I also, I’m really hopeful, I love…I think you have a very classic fannish origin story here, where like, you were like, “This is just a thing I wanna do,” and then you’re like, “Oh, other people are doing it to,” right, that’s how I learned about fanfiction, right? But I also would love the idea that people might hear this—and I’m sure that’s what’s been happening over the last few years, people are seeing it and they’re saying, “Oh, it never even occurred to me you could do that.” So I’m hopeful that we send—I hope we inspire people to join you guys.
TFB: Thanks.
ELM: Including Flourish.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Obviously I’m like, I’m totally discounting myself. This is not…I’m not a physical crafter.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah but, this is because you, this is because you know that if I do get into this I’m obviously going to bind one of your fics, Elizabeth. [laughs] So…
ELM: [overlapping] Well, Flourish…
TFB: [overlapping] I was gonna say…
FK: [laughing] You’re like, this is a slightly self-motivated encouragement…
ELM: [overlapping] I wouldn’t say no. I, I think my fics are infinitely bindable.
FK: OK, great, everybody, you heard it here first, Elizabeth’s—
TFB: [overlapping] Every year [ELM and FK laugh] a new edition, you just put the new year at the bottom that’s like, “Elizabeth’s Fic #75, Edition 10.”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: [overlapping] That’s good. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah yeah, perfect.
TFB: [overlapping] This is the 2025 edition. You know.
ELM: That’s right. That’s right.
FK: [laughs] All right.
ELM: The collected works. [FK laughs]
TFB: With gold leaf. [ELM laughs]
FK: Thank you so much for coming on, this has been an incredible conversation.
TFB: Thank you so much for having me, as you can tell, there’s nothing I love more than [all laugh] talking about books.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, so…I have to say that I literally went and joined that Discord.
ELM: What’s it like so far?
FK: Fabulous. I’m delighted. Uh, it is a very, I would say like, the feeling is sort of, to me, a very old-school fandom feeling of like… [laughing] people just getting together and really deeply nerding out about a craft thing. I mean of course everybody else who is into individual fanfics and things like that, but it really is reminding me a lot of some fanfic spaces that I was in in like, the early 2000s almost. Just in terms of like…pan-fandom craft conversation, slash and het and gen all sort of mixed up together, and…I don’t know, it’s, I feel like I found a group of my people, [laughs] so I’m very excited about this.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s, that’s delightful. So, when are you gonna start binding?
FK: Realistically, probably [laughing] after the birth of my child.
ELM: You have so much time, what are you talking about?
FK: I have so many projects that I have to do to get ready for this kid.
ELM: You don’t think that the child, first things first, is not gonna want a bound copy of your favorite fanfiction?
FK: I don’t think that it would be a good thing for me to give a child a copy of my favorite fanfiction, I think they need to wait for probably like… [laughing] 16 years or so before that would be an appropriate thing to share.
ELM: Wow, what…what kind of, uh…what story is this?
FK: I don’t, I don’t even know what story, I’m just assuming that it has a sex scene or two in it, [ELM laughs] you know? And I feel like, at a certain point maybe you get to a place where you can acknowledge that your parents know what sex is, but it’s definitely not before you’re the age of 16.
ELM: I also, I mean, I guess there’s people out there whose parents maybe share fanfiction with them, but I, I kind of, I kind of feel like if your kid is into fanfiction…maybe you want them to find stuff for themselves, as opposed to you just…you know?
FK: Right, if you’re the parent who want to do it…
ELM: Handing over the rec list. [laughs]
FK: I did hand, I did give fanfic to my mom when I was a teenager, she read fanfic also.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying. [laughs]
FK: That’s fine. No, I know, I’m just saying, like…there was some sharing, but it went that direction. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, but it’s like…if you, like, “Now son, daughter, child…here’s your parent’s favorite sex scenes,” like, I don’t know. That’s just a little…even if you have a super chill relationship, I just feel like it’s a, its…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s kinda steppin’ on toes, you know?
FK: [laughs] It is really funny, because I have a friend who is a researcher who studies internet culture, who has a child who is a teenager, and this child…whenever I come over, like, knows that I’m a fandom person, right, and the funny thing is the child’s mom knows all of these terms, and like is fully aware of fanfiction as a thing, but obviously doesn’t talk with her kid about it.
So the kid asks me about things, like, trying to catch me out or embarrass me. [ELM laughs] Like, you know, I can’t even think of what one was, but like…you know, some kind of a term for some kind of porn or whatever, and I’m just, and I’m like, “Yes, of course I will explain that to you,” [both laugh] and I explain it to them, and obviously they knew what it was, and they just thought they were gonna embarrass me, and I’m like, “Nope, kiddo…”
ELM: Not embarrassable. [laughs]
FK: Totally unembarrassable, in fact I’m going to embarrass you, because I do know what that means. [laughs]
ELM: That’s really funny.
FK: Anyway, I love that interaction, and I hope that they are not listening to this and getting mad about me talking about it. I did it in a very non, um…
ELM: Blowing up their spot…
FK: A non-blowing-up-your-spot way. So. [laughs]
ELM: OK. OK, good. Um, anyway…I am delighted, I, I wanna see what you create…
FK: I—well, look. As I said, if I create any fanbinding, [laughing] I will probably fanbind something that you wrote, so.
ELM: That’s why I wanna see it, I would like to see it, as the meme goes.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] I’m not gonna hide it from you if I do. [both laugh] I mean actually I might, because I’m a little scared of your typography judgements, but I’ll get over it.
ELM: Yeah, it is, it is quite funny to me—first of all, I wouldn’t tell you. [FK laughs] Uh…but second of all, yeah, like, you know, interviewing, interviewing Tiffo for the article, too, it really struck me because there’s so much working backwards that so many fanbinders do, they’re like, “Well, we see this, and we’re trying to figure out like…” you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s like…you know, I worked in, I made the, physically made the print edition of The New Yorker for five years.
FK: Yes, [laughing] this is, this is why I’m scared of your typography judgment, Elizabeth.
ELM: No, I know—we had extremely precise rules for every—so it’s not just like, “Oh, you generally put it here, you kinda do this, make it look good.”
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s like…if, you know, it’s very regimented, and part of the training, because it was back in the day, would be like…get your notebook, start writing. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Little diagrams, little measurements, that kinda thing. So. So, I find it kinda charming that people are reverse engineering this. And don’t worry, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t judge you. I mean, I judge printed books, honestly, it kinda made it harder for me.
FK: [overlapping] I was gonna say, I might, I might ask for your taste on something that was not, like, a gift I was giving you, you know what I mean? [laughs] Like, I might ask you to look at something.
ELM: Oh, I would be happy to consult on your, um, on your…
FK: Perfect.
ELM: Page layout, absolutely.
FK: Great. Love it. Because, uh, I have discovered from being on the Discord that I have strong opinions, and no basis for them. So I’m excited to develop a basis for them, and like, learn why some things look so wrong to me? And if they really are wrong, you know? Like, I’m…
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. I mean…yeah. No—
FK: [laughing] I’m thrilled to discover that I have opinions with no basis, and learn about why.
ELM: Like, everything with, everything with style is…you know, it’s not, there’s no hard and fast rules. But, but sticking to them is important.
FK: [laughs] I agree with that. OK.
ELM: Like, setting your own rules. Anyway, that is super exciting, I hope that—honestly I hope you’re not the only one who’s inspired to join.
FK: I can’t imagine that I would be, there must be other people like me out there [laughs] who are like, this sounds perfect.
ELM: [overlapping] From this episode. Yeah, yeah yeah. OK, so everything will be in the show notes, we’re gonna have pictures…
FK: Yup.
ELM: We’re gonna have all these resources for everyone, and of course they can join the Renegade Discord, and if they wanna start doing it.
FK: All right. We should probably do our business, then.
ELM: Yes, it’s business time. OK. [pause, both laugh] Sorry.
FK: You know what’s, you know what’s running through my head at this point.
ELM: What?
FK: [singing “Business Time”] It’s business, it’s business time! [laughs]
ELM: I don’t even know what you’re singing. How would I have known that that was running through your head?
FK: It was like, a meme? A song? That New Zealand duo? Talkin’ about the business socks, when they’re gonna have sex?
ELM: No! I’ve never heard of this, I do not know your meme, Flourish.
FK: [laughing] We will put it in the show notes.
ELM: [laughing] OK, can’t wait to learn about this.
FK: It’s the, it’s the, OK, I’m trying to think of the name of the pair, and one of the two is the elf called Figwit in Lord of the Rings?
ELM: [in a tiny voice] No idea. [FK laughs]
FK: You’ll know them when I show you the thing. You’ll be like, “Oh, those guys.”
ELM: The only singing duo I know from New Zealand is the Flight of the Conchords guys.
FK: It is! That’s who they are! It’s a Flight of the Conchords song.
ELM: [overlapping] OK, I haven’t even watched that show, I just know of them.
FK: Well, I, yeah, I haven’t—anyway, it’s a Flight of the Conchords song, about having sex wearing business socks. Anyway.
ELM: OK. All right. Like Eliot Spitzer. Yes. All right.
FK: [laughs] Oh, we made it bad. All right. But fandom business— [laughs]
ELM: Kept his socks on.
FK: [laughing] Fandom business.
ELM: Uh…Fansplaining business, Patreon.com/Fansplaining is how we pay for our transcriptionists, it’s how we pay our hosting costs, and we have a new special episode, as we mentioned last time. It is about your gender identity.
FK: By way of forced marriage fic. We’re also working on another special episode about House, M.D.
ELM: Here’s, here’s what’s happenin’ over here, lemme tell you. OK. So people may—actually I think I only said it in the special episode, but you may have been able to tell from the last few episodes that I sounded like I had a cold of some kind. Some sort of upper respiratory issue. In fact, it is pneumonia.
FK: Like, bad pneumonia, not just pneumonia, but like, pneumonia.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t know, bad pneumonia, to me, would be like, I would be in the hospital.
FK: OK, but it’s like, it’s like…
ELM: It’s not great. I will say that.
FK: It’s really unfortunate, you’re making it sound like it’s not that bad, but I have seen you sick many times before and you’re pretty sick.
ELM: Thank you very much. So here’s what I’m gonna say. First of all, I do not, I do not understand how you watched all eight seasons of House, twenty-two episodes per season, in like a month. [FK laughs] Did you literally watch…did you watch like, did you watch literally all day every day?
FK: I…have blocked this out. So maybe?
ELM: Because I, I’ve had pneumonia for several weeks now, and I made it through one season.
FK: Yeah, well…I uh, don’t know what to say. I am just very skilled at TV binging. [laughs]
ELM: I don’t understand this at all. Second of all, I’m gonna tell you this. This is a tip for everyone. Do not start watching House right when you’re diagnosed with pneumonia. [FK laughs] I…like, this is not, every single thing, it’s like one of the episodes…a kid’s coughing, he has anthrax. And then it turns out actually, he has leprosy, too. And I’m just sitting here like, “Oh my God. Are Chase and Foreman gonna have to come to my house and start swabbing things?” Like, it’s genuinely making me paranoid.
FK: I will say that there are several episodes about pregnant people that were not fabulous. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] I was thinking about this, yeah.
FK: But you know what? I knuckled down and got through ’em and you will too. OK. Anyway.
ELM: I just—I watched a whole season so far, there’s a lot more pneumonia than pregnancy, I’m not gonna lie, there genuinely is, there’s a lot more issues going on in the lungs than there are in the uterus, so…
FK: [overlapping] There is, there is a lot more pneumonia than pregnancy, there is. [laughs] Yes, that’s true. That’s true. That’s very true. Everybody has lungs, not everyone has a uterus.
ELM: That’s…that’s so true.
FK: All right. Anyway, we will have an episode about this soon.
ELM: Yeah, I’m, I’m not, I don’t think it’s realistic for me to watch the entire show, but I certainly would have plenty to say about the first season, so maybe I’ll watch first—maybe I’ll watch up until the original trio leaves.
FK: All right, well, it’s up to you.
ELM: Unless you really wanna talk about, like, Kutner.
FK: I don’t. At all.
ELM: Thirteen. Or the other guy. I’ve forgotten his name already.
FK: Not particularly, although I might make you watch the finale also.
ELM: What’s his name? Bald guy.
FK: Yeah, the guy who was also on Walking Dead.
ELM: [laughs] You just watched all these episodes and you don’t remember his name?
FK: No! He plays a rabbi on Walking Dead. On House he plays a plastic surgeon who has an infidelity problem.
ELM: Oh, Flourish, you’re driving me crazy, I’m gonna look it up right now.
FK: We are so off-topic here, we need to get back to the…
ELM: House, M.D. is always the topic. Uh… [pause] Oh, Dr. Taub!
FK: Taub!
ELM: Taub.
FK: All right. That will come out, and the people who will get that episode are the ones who pay $3/month or more on our Patreon. If you pay $5/month or more, you get a cute little fandom pin; $10, you get our Tiny Zine when we put them out; and you get access to all of the previous special episodes, so it’s super super worth it. And you should support us, because that’s how we make this podcast. But if you don’t have money or wanna give us money, you can still support us by…spreading the word about the podcast and our transcripts, which are a big deal, most podcasts don’t manage to make transcripts for every episode by humans.
ELM: You didn't have to bring in other podcasts.
FK: Yes I did. Because we’re better than them. [laughing] And people should listen to us in preference, or rather read us in preference.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I am really glad that we’re able to put out transcripts when we put out the audio, I’m…
FK: Right!
ELM: It’s worth it.
FK: And, you can also write in and give us questions, comments, ideas for episodes, this is how we do a lot of the podcast. So you can do that by calling in at 1-401-526-FANS, you’ll get a voicemail and you can leave us a little message. You can also write us or send us, like, a little audio clip, to fansplaining at gmail.com; keep it short. You can send something to our ask box on Tumblr, fansplaining.tumblr.com, anon is on over there; there’s also a little form on our Fansplaining.com website that you can write into; so lots of ways to contact us. Be in touch, we like that.
ELM: Be in touch.
FK: All right. What else is there to say, Elizabeth?
ELM: I think that’s business concluded.
FK: Great. Well, thank you—
ELM: Is that a, is that a meme from the internet too? Business over?
FK: No. Not that—I mean, maybe, not one that I know.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t know, I don’t know about your business sex songs.
FK: I will say, thank you for this episode, Elizabeth, thank you for bringing Tiffo to me almost like a present. [ELM laughs] That’s how I feel about this episode. That was great.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Tiffo, I hope you’re glad that I described you as my present. [ELM laughs]
ELM: Yeah, it was like, having Tiffo on was absolutely like a present.
FK: Yeah. OK.
ELM: Not, Tiffo themselves are not the present, their presence was the…all right.
FK: All right, we’re gonna stop makin’ it weird. I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: K, bye Flourish.
FK: [laughing] Bye.
[Outro music]