You ever get into those pissing contests where you try to do something for the longest time or prove you have the most of something or make the biggest thing just to see if you can? Maybe it's not even that advisable, but man didn't make it to the moon by sitting at home worrying about whether it was a dumb-shit thing to do just to prove you could do it—you know what I mean?
What I'm trying to say here is that I've taken a three-volume boxed set of The Lord of the Rings and I'm going to put it all between one set of covers.
The fact that I don't have a lot of cover board in stock has nothing to do with this, nor does my fetish for combining bookbinding with chainmaille as soon as humanly possible and I have this vision of a sheet of fine maille draped over an absurdly wide leather book spine. Just, okay, just picture this monstrous concoction on your bookshelf taking up more attention span than the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. It's going to be beautiful and, somehow, I hope to God, not prone to structural collapse.
So here's what I started with.
Pretty unexciting mass-market paperback boxed set of the trilogy. I stripped off the covers and spines, then whittled out pages that I wouldn't need. The single-volume edition will only need one map section, whereas currently I have three. Really just need one copyright page too. Actually, all these title pages should get consolidated into one. Stuff like that. I printed off a few custom pages to tip in where needed and make the whole thing cohere.
Speaking of cohering, it soon became obvious that no amount of fresh glue was going to bring these three volumes into one, not without two very obvious parts in the spine. I decided the way to make everything work out was to first break the whole thing down into much smaller chunks, then bring all those together so as to avoid two big obvious breaks in favor of many little ones. Alvenh Channe led the way with this excellent tutorial on overcast sewing, a technique designed for single sheet binding.
So, after some quality time with a very sharp knife and an incredibly tiny drill bit, I got my signatures all ready for stitching. After even more time with a needle and a good amount of thread, I finished up with this wonderfully monstrous cinderblock of text:
I don't know about you but I'm pretty excited to see this thing on a bookshelf once it's all grown up.
Some stats, if you're into numbers at all: It has 1137 pages of content for 591 total sheets of paper (with title pages, tables of contents, etc.). The pages are chunked into 16-sheet groups, of which there are 37, each with 10 holes. The needle passes through each of these holes twice, so that's 740 stitches. Number of times I stabbed myself with the needle: just once!
