I finally got around to making my own book. Its for my wife to introduce her to ML.

It looks really janky rustic and I hope it holds together well but we’ll see I guess. Unfortunately I was careless with the glue in when sticking the text block to the cover and so it looks really dirty.

I typeset it myself in LaTeX then printed it on regular A4 copy paper, which unfortunately has the wrong grain direction since I want to fold it but finding proper paper is impossible. I’m going to buy a huge roll of paper and cut it myself next time probably since its rather cheap actually, like 20€ for a roll of 0.61x50m A1 paper.

Bound it with the cheapest linen thread, waxed with paraffin because I still dont know of a good beeswax alternative, glued the spine with regular white craft glue. The tapes are really thin linen gauze. I got the boards from the back of notebooks and glued it all together with corn starch. I think this whole book of 300 pages = 125 sheets cost less than a euro since its basically paper, toner, some thread, some gauze and a few grams of corn starch. Oh and the wrapping is some brown packing paper.

I’m hoping to make a couple books like this so I get a library going but I dont know if I’ll bind it on board again or just glue it on some carton. It’s a lot more effort to glue it on board and they’re still warped despite all my efforts.

I’m thinking of printing the covers on 120gsm cardboard and gluing them together over the spine basically thread the linen gauze through the back cover and glue it on, then glue the front cover so the tapes are sealed. then I could just tip the textblock on the covers and it would cause that much warp. Dunno yet though. First I gotta typeset “Imperialsm, the highest stage of capitalism”, which is next on the list.