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English
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Malevolent Big Bang 2025
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Published:
2025-10-15
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554
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1/1
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A Comprehensive History and Analysis of the Poetry of John Doe [fanbinding]

Summary:

A fanbinding of A Comprehensive History and Analysis of the Poetry of John Doe by WordsINeededtoGetOut

In this volume we will be exploring the works of John Doe (unknown - 1997) and presenting a detailed overview of his personal and professional history. Doe scholarship is particularly important at this time due to newly discovered letters, photographs, and poetry that were released by his estate in 2025. The documents have put Doe’s life and work back into the public consciousness, and the knowledge gained from these texts has ignited discourse on how this new information influences the analysis of his work. The essays within offer new perspectives on Doe’s old and new texts, and seek to find new meaning within Doe canon.

Notes:

This work was created as part of the Malevolent Big Bang 2025 event! Thank you so much to the other mods for helping make this event run smoothly, and a huge thank you to my collaborative partners, Moss and Bones. Moss wrote the wonderful fic that this bind is of, and Bones did the artwork for the cover as well as all of the photograph artwork for the centerfold. Check out the fic and Bones's artwork posts below:

- Moss's Fic
- Bones's Artwork

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Two identical hand-bound books stacked atop one another. They are bound in dark green cloth with a gold-painted vine pattern on the cover that surrounds a black rectangle with the title, 'A Comprehensive History and Analysis of the Poetry of John Doe,' and author name, 'Moss,' painted atop it in gold.

A hand-bound book open and sitting face-down so both covers and the spine can be seen. There is a gold-painted vine pattern on the front and back covers, as well as a black rectangle on the front cover with the title and author name painted in gold. The spine also has a black rectangle with the words '20th century poetry, Vol. 63, John Doe' painted on it in gold. There is a gold quill on the bottom of the spine.

I had the absolute pleasure of working with Moss and Bones as an artist on this year's Malevolent Big Bang 2025 event! Moss wrote the incredible academic-style fic A Comprehensive History and Analysis of the Poetry of John Doe, which is told in a series of essays, interviews, letters, photos, and poems that are structured as if they're academic articles and sources about real-life poet John Doe and his newly-revealed queer relationship with songwriter Arthur Lester. This fic is truly phenomenal, creative, and emotional, and everyone reading this should go read it.

It also lent itself incredibly well to a bookbinding project! Before I get into the typeset and the various intricacies, I want to shout out the other artist on this project, Bones, who illustrated every single photo from the fic, as well as designed the cover art that you can see above. It was truly a wonderful experience to work with him and to have a collection of wonderful photos to include in the bind, and I was able to make glossy centerfolds to show them off.

A two-page glossy spread of black-and-white digital artwork that has been made to look like poloroid photographs. The leftmost image shows Oscar smiling at the camera while John throws Arthur over his shoulder in the background. The rightmost image shows John, with Arthur still over his shoulder, grinning at Oscar, who has his head thrown back in laughter. A description of the photographs is printed beneath them.

For the typeset for this fic, I used a Penguin Classics paperback copy of a poetry collection for most of my references, as well as a copy of another book that contained essays about poets. The typeset is simple and elegant, with a focus on readability, but in elegance comes a high attention to detail and making sure that every component of the fic looked clean and crisp and correct (which is to say, simple does not mean fast!). I'm really happy with the overall effect of it, especially the poems, which Moss helped me out with determining the right formatting for.

The title page of a hand-bound book, which has the title 'A comprehensive history and analysis of the poetry of John Doe,' author name 'Moss,' and publishing name '20th Century Poetry' in an all-caps serif font. 'John Doe' from the title, however, is in a large fancy script front. The publishing name is beside an icon of a quill.The table of contents of a hand-bound book, formatted similar to the Penguin Classics style of formatting. There are headers for Essays and Collected Documents, with the various contents of those sections listed below them.

The introduction page for the Essays section, which has the word 'Essays' in all caps with curling ornaments to either side of it.The beginning page for one of the essays, titled ‘All My Days I Will Carry This Name’: AN Exploration of Femininity and Identify in John Doe’s ‘A Gift From Lilly’. It is formatted to look similar to other, professionally printed literature books.

A two-page spread of some of the poems from the fic, formatted so as to be similar to formally published poetry collections.

Most of the rest of the process was similar to my standard--printing the text with my laser printer and the photos with my inkjet, making the textblock, trimming and speckling the edges, sewing endbands, etc.. I used my current favorite French double-core endbands with my also current favorite random color pattern, which doesn't require keeping track of the number of loops I've done and has a neat sort of disordered effect to it.

The top of a hand-bound book, focusing on the endbands, which are French double-core and sewn with black, white, and gold thread. The edges are speckled with green and gold paint.

The endpapers continued the pattern of greens and golds with green marbled lokta paper. Originally, the two copies I made were going to have different endpapers per copy, one with green endpapers and one with white, but I accidentally cased in the white copy upside down (oops) so I had to tear it out, replace the endpapers, and re-case it. So now they both have the same endpapers!

A hand-bound book open to the endpapers, which are green paper marbeled with white and gold paint.

These books are also somewhat of a custom size, based on a book of Walt Whitman's poetry that I have on my shelf. According to Word, the size is essentially B6; I'm definitely going to make more books in this size in the future, as it has a really nice handfeel to it as opposed to quarter letter sized books that are too square and almost clumsy to hold.

Bind Details

  • Size: 4.9" by 6.9" (B6)
  • Number of Pages: 140
  • Binding Method: Case
  • Body Font: Garamond
  • Title Font: Garamond, Edwardian Script ITC
  • Cover Design: bones.mt
  • Printing: 20lb cream paper, LaserJet printer
  • Cover materials: Green cloth fabric backed with Heat-N-Bond, gold Jacquard Lumiere fabric paint, black acrylic paint
  • Endbands: French double-core with green, yellow, and white silk Gutermann thread

Notes:

You can find the rebloggable version of this bind on Tumblr here!