The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.

at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”

Binderary Week 2

Been holding onto this one for a while, but I'm excited to share it now 😍

Had the absolute pleasure of binding @littlesponge-fics Dead Salvation, a Bakugou x Reader, Dead Space AU! From the cover to the interior, I kept the color scheme red/white/black. The title set up on the cover came to me in the middle of the night, and I used heat reactive foil to give it an extra shine. Ended up making two copies, one for a friend and an author copy. Overall, very pleased with how it turned out!

(Completed: 2/11/2023)

A Great and Gruesome Height

Okay, here it is: my favorite bind to date! A Great and Gruesome Height by mokuyoubi wasn’t my first Hannigram fic, but it is my favorite so far, and I knew this book deserved something special! This bind needed drama, so I reached out to a fellow binder to collaborate and was THRILLED that the incredibly talented @/ferns.and.fables on Instagram agreed to design this stunning dust jacket with character art by @miasmatik! The case is covered in maroon book cloth with multi layered HTV details. The endpapers are also by miasmatik and I love how macabre and gorgeous they are! I am really obsessed with how this turned out! It truly is this bright—it’s not just the editing! 🤣

Volume one of the Author's copy of the wonderful fic, If You Give A Bat a Burger by @noir-renard. This is a super fun fic that captures the fun and chaos of the Bat Fam with the gremlin energy of Danny Phantom. I experimented a lot with this binding both with the typeset (adding images!) and with the actual build. This book's fancy! It's got book cloth AND headbands!

I worked really hard to rebind the hunger games trilogy in swedish for myself since there is no nice copies out there

First Do No Harm by Jonathan Edelstein

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.

My favourite thing about fan fiction is the experience of watching/reading something and being like ‘huh - I can see a potential pairing there, those two characters could be interesting together’. And then you casually look up the pairing on AO3 and someone has written the most beautiful, heart-wrenching love story you’ve ever read, with character analysis that makes you want to scream, and they’ve teased out the threads of the relationship dynamic in such an interesting way that makes so much SENSE, but you never would have thought it would be so fucking ELECTRIC. And then you recover enough from that fic to read another one, and it’s JUST AS FUCKING GOOD, and before you know it, it’s 3am and your eyes are burning and you’re squinting at the 100th scene of them confessing their love for each other and it’s still not enough. You know what I’m saying???

Fanfictions are myths. We all take the same source material and we say "Here's what this looks like from where I live, am sitting, know, believe."

This is why we can read 100 coffee shop AUs because they're NOT all the same. They come from the same myth, but each retelling gives it a new facet, spin, character…fanfictions are modern myths and I love them.

The Strange Mixtape by @deadcanons. MCU, 64k, casebound at quarto size. Two copies - one for me, one for the author! Plus a funky slipcase to keep it safe in the mail.

The bookcloth and endpapers I both found while on vacation last month. The cloth reminded me a lot of the Aaron Bachalo run of Strange comics, which the author mentioned in the notes as visual inspiration - and I just thought the endpapers looked funky and chaotic and magical in general. The cutouts on the front and the back have a magic circle and a spiderweb vellum underlay, respectively! I always like using this technique on covers, and it felts especially good here.

The slipcase - pulling it together was tricky enough that I only made one of them, and that one's going to the author. There's so much comics inspiration in this fic that I liked the idea of using comics collages to decorate them. I found some nice free wallpaper online for both Strange and Spidey, and I think it brings the whole thing together. There's a New York skyline on the top, a pair of dangling headphones down the spine, and a functional Spotify code for the overall fic playlist on the bottom.

Typeset in Georgia, with Dr.Charmed used for titles and chapter headers, and OCR A Extended for the song tabs. Every chapter has a corresponding song, which is named and cited at the start, with a QR code and a Spotify link so you can listen along while reading!

I was so delighted with this fic when I first read it that I immediately began typesetting it for binding. That was a few months ago, so pulling it together like this is unimaginably satisfying. It's delightful, punchy, and - most importantly to me - every song on the playlist is an absolute banger. Highly recommend checking it out, and please remember to give the author some love!

Made some bookmarks while i was reading the manga and figured I'd share. They're all meant to be printed 6" x 2"

Fun and Cool Free Zines on Archive.org:

Due to the nature of some of these and my wish not to get banned from Tumblr I am 100% absolutely sharing these simply as thinkpieces and not in any way as tools to use in real-life contexts. All theoretical and for the use in say, a paper for freshman students who have just started class accross the United States.

Address to the Refugees by delicatelyglitterywriter (@trailmixtime) and Gremlin_Of_Space (@v4n1r). It's a Gallifrey Audios fusion AU with Chronicles of Narnia.

86k words, casebound at folio size. The front and back details are cutaways with printed vellum for a slightly translucent titlepiece. The spine has the title done up in silver, which is difficult to see unless it catches the light - it doesn't translate well to photography. Typeset in Baskerville Old Face, using Winob for titles and dropcaps. The chapter header illustrations (and linebreaks, which I forgot to take photos of) are all by me!

Single copy made, which I gave to @trailmixtime when I saw xem in person last month!

Hope-

Or tfw you touch grass for the first time in your life, and it makes you so sappy that you can't help it but pray for a brigther future.

If, in said future, there's also your best friend, well, who are you to not hope a little more?

Portland, Maine by BonkyBornes, binding by DCB Bindery (dontcallmebree)

Specs: Square back bradel, green edges with gold sprinkling, white endbands, gold endpapers, 63 pages, A6. With an accompanying unpublished alternate fic as bonus content.

A favorite of mine from @bonky-bornes that lands exactly where it should and digs into all the softest crevices of your heart. Melancholic and full of heartache, reading this felt like a painful, refreshing bout of rain.

On the process: It was so much fun trying to typeset something stripped back yet still elegant to match the tone of this story, and I really ended up liking the clean look of this. The snippet of the summary on the back was a last minute choice that I ended up adoring.

I wanted a nature-inspired, rainy feel and look, so in addition to the umbrella and images, I decided to do gold sprinkled edges over green to emulate raindrops and add a bit of sparkle. Overall, I think this is pretty close to what I had in mind!

More DCB Bindery Projects

Tiny Books Bang 2023

The Kaer Morhen Book Club by @jackironsides, typeset by @catspawbindery . Amyda has received her copy, and so has the author! so here we goooo

I JUMPED at the chance to bind this - agonised for a while about whether or not I got my first choice in claims - as this was a fic I already know and love and I had IDEAS for what to do with it. Amyda's typeset was so inspiring, including a frontispiece and medieval-esque fonts, and since the fic features medieval romance novels (chivalric, really) I thought it would be fun to try to emulate the binding of the novel Starcrossed Love as described in the fic:

This is an octavo binding (though printed on A4 paper, so a very small octavo - an A7-sized book), it has a leather spine (animal: unknown), marbled cove papers, and a star foiled onto the spine with a hot foil pen. for endpapers I chose Japanese Chiyogami paper as I'd stumbled over this particular pattern by accident and thought both the colour scheme and pattern matched the medieval vibe. the headbands are green and gold embroidery floss.

I struggled a little with the leather - which I've never worked with before - so my own copy (the first trial copy) didn't come out as well, but lessons learned and the typesetter's and the author copies came out beautifully.

my copy, using a different, thicker leather for the spine, resulting in no visible hinge at all:

it doesn't look bad, but it's not the vibe I wanted and I had to do a lot of infilling to account for the thickness of the leather since I didn't have any leather paring tools.

the author's copy is a different colour scheme for two reasons: I sourced the leather from the leather scraps bin in Shepherd's, London, and the pieces were very small. I was only able to find two pieces large enough to cover the spine of an A7 (I'd brought along a dummy to test the scraps against) and the two pieces were different colours. I also didn't have enough of the medieval-esque Chiyogamy for a 3rd set of endpapers so I chose a wildly different but striking Chiyogamy paper to match the colours of the leather and marbled paper. the headbands are dark blue and pale blue embroidery floss.

bonus: all three copies together:

Just saw a tweet like "REAL libraries check for quality!" as some kinda gotcha at AO3?? But I'm a librarian, so... heads up that "quality checks," AKA "weeding" or "pulling," means looking for damaged books or ones that haven't circulated in a few years to clear up shelf space. We don't Quality Check for if the library books have nontoxic romance or good grammar. :U I assure you every library in your area has absolute ABOMINATIONS of bad storytelling as well as your favorite pop lit.

Also books that we bare our teeth at every time we see them on the shelf and quietly chant to ourselves "freedom of information access is more important than the fact that I hate you, freedom of information access is more important than the fact that I hate you - "

Like we have 1.7 million+ items in our collection do you think that a staff of 50 actually has time to even physically page thru or run thru every one of them? If every single staff member were only taking one hour to look through every single book or other collection piece (movies, games, whatever) (which: an hour would NOT be enough even to look at every single part of most of them, but okay fine, an hour), that's still 1.7 million hours divided between 50 people. That's 34K work hours, which at 35 hours a week is more than 971 weeks, aka and that's with all of us doing nothing else, at all.

That would be 18 years just to give each single solitary book an hour, reviewing full time, 35 hours a week, with 50 staff only doing that. And we're a small, single-branch library.

Don't be silly.

Also also (forgive my tangent, OP) it is as a librarian/information-services professional, honestly, that I will cut you over AO3. As a pure end-user/fan/etc are there things about it that are not my favourite/I wish were different? Yeah, sure.

As a public-facing information professional whose education and preferred career path involves the impossibilities of classification and cataloguing and subject-heading and "community-led collection and program development" and all that shit that is also what everyone at AO3 has to do daily for like millions larger community than I do, I will throw down right here and right now, man. You could literally not pay me enough to take leadership role in a community-led collection for our fuckheaded fan community, I know us way too well. We are worse to deal with than a municipal community, we are literally everything you could point out about the most fractious possible arts community with everyone absolutely sure that their preferred way of doing things is the obvious mass will of the community (while being diametrically opposed to the way that an entire other huge chunk of the community wants) - you could not PAY ME, and it's mostly being done out of love, for free, on a budget a fraction the size of what my (small, municipal) library works with.

Good grief.

Also... “real libraries check for quality” is kinda ignoring the first damn word of the site. It’s not just a library, it’s an archive. Archives don’t “check for quality” unless it’s in the service of preservation. (And if you’re thinking “yeah but anyone can just go read AO3, it’s not like a real archive” buddy do I ever have news for you about the vast majority of “real” archives.)

So true. SO true.

One of the books I bound for Tiny Books Bang held by Renegade Bindery! It's a sextodecimo, meaning the whole book is about 5x7 cm.

Kodiak Island Drifting is A League of Their Own/Pacific Rim fusion, and who could say no to that combo? It was written and typeset by @obstinatecondolement.

This was the first time I tried sewn board binding with breakaway spine, and I loved it! Also first time making a self-ended book, because the blank page count just worked out perfectly.

I was also lucky enough to get my hands on some Soviet era materials that I think go very well with the postapocalyptic/50s vibes of the fandoms involved.

This is the process of doing an edgepainting! It's easier to do than you'd think. Cat breaks are necessary.

Embroidered Book Covers, 15th-17th centuries