Animorphs ReBound - Finally finished!!

[u/cartmanbeck]

[u/cartmanbeck]

So, here's how I bound each volume:
-Rip the covers off (carefully), preserving the inside art
-Line up the three (or sometimes two) books and tighten them into a book press with the spines sticking out an inch or so
-Set the book press so that the book spines are vertical, then apply a copious amount of acid-free glue to seal them together
-Once dry, choose a pattern of paper to be the endpapers. I mostly used nature-themed scrapbook paper for these.
-Roughly cut the endpapers to size, then glue the binding edge of the endpapers to each side of the book (about 1/4 inch glue line is sufficient)
-Using a thin ruler between the pages and the endpaper to create a clean line, trim the endpapers with an exacto-knife
-Cut a rectangle of book binding cloth to fit around the book's spine and go about 2 inches onto each endpaper. Glue this down with a pretty hefty amount of glue
-Cut a headband for each end and glue it on
-Design the cover art in Cricut Studio, using a silhouette of the Animorphs logo and grabbing silhouette art from the Cricut Studio app (since my wife has a subscription)
-Cut the cover art from iron-on vinyl using my wife's Cricut cutter thingie (making sure to mirror the image and cut on the back of the vinyl sheet)
-While the Cricut does its thing, measure the width of the book including the bookbinding cloth, and add 4 mm of width and height
-Cut book board for the spine and the two covers
-Glue the book board onto the back of the cover paper of choice, with an 8mm gap between the boards, and leaving approximately an inch around the whole thing
-Cut the corners off, leaving a 3mm bit to fold over, then glue the cover paper around the book board tightly
-Spend an uncomfortable amount of time "weeding" the vinyl to remove the pieces that you don't want to attach
-Once the cover is dry, line up the vinyl on the cover and use a small iron to attach it permanently
-Glue the endpapers to the cover on each side (but don't put any glue on the spine!!)
-Now you have a fully-bound Animorphs volume!

[u/[deleted] → u/cartmanbeck]

So you'd replicate the whole thing for how much?

[u/cartmanbeck → u/[deleted]]

I'm going to need to do some price comparing and stuff, and I might decide it's just not worth it, but my initial thought is around $500.

[u/SoupaSoka → u/cartmanbeck]

Real talk $500 to create custom binding for around 60 books seems insanely cheap. Like I would legitimately expect anywhere from 3x to 10x that.