urchin specials
Mar. 25th, 2023 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerakroseA while ago I had the idea to try to bind fanfic to look like a Penguin Classic. I was thinking of these highly recognisable designs:
I never did anything with the idea because the thought of making a case that has horizontal stripes was just a nightmare, you'd have to fit together three different strips across a spine piece and two boards and have them line up and I just... no. I never let go of the idea though, and then in October Ratchford had their annual October sale. I ordered a bunch of things including a mystery box of book cloth - their mystery boxes are great value for money so long as one doesn't mind surprises! I got metres upon metres of book cloth in various colours and makes, including a gorgeous bright orange in a shade very reminiscent of that Penguin Orange.
My next step was to get a copy of Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 by Phil Baines - this was on our curriculum as suggested reading at Stirling but I didn't look too closely at it since book design wasn't a field I was going to go into. I also knew (largely because it had been covered at Stirling) that this was the best resource on Penguin cover designs short of visiting the Penguin Archives or going back to Stirling to study *their* collection of Penguins. But I read this cover to cover, making notes as I went along, going back to read sections in more detail, studying the photos of the covers closely, and so on.
And then I set to figuring out a design that paid homage to Penguin while also:
1) be disting from existing designs
2) be cohesive and recognisable; it should look like it *could* have been a Penguin design
3) be suitable for what I had in mind as the design had to work for fanfic, not tradpub fiction
4) be suitable as an imprint of my own "press"; everything I bind gets an ashmouth books imprint logo and this had to fit under that
without paraphrasing the entire book, here are photos of the main designs I took inspiration from.
the main horizontal design that became known in our collective consciousness as The Penguin Classics Design. they had different colours for different genres - green was for Crime, for example.
at one point they branched out into a vertical design:
and during the war they launched a specific Penguin Specials line that specialised in non-fiction about the war, these were very quick books that were commissioned and turned around in a matter of weeks.
And here's the Pelican imprint, a non-fiction series:
The funniest (and most frustrating?) thing about the history of Penguin covers is that the covers weren't actually all that consistent. even within the same design archetype you would run into variations and you had designers and publishers make decisions to change so and so for the better or worse. The design we're seeing on tote bags and mugs today is a stylised modern version of the old horizontal designs, yes, but it's also a standardised design.
Anyway. I played around with some ideas and eventually decided I wanted to model mine primarily after the vertical design, simply because it would be easier to bind - it would be like a half bound book, only I would also be covering the fore-edge with book cloth (a quarter bound book has the spine and the corners covered with book cloth or leather and a paper covering on the rest, I'm not sure if there's a term for the kind where the fore-edge is covered). I didn't like the chaotic and inconsistent typefaces and illustrations on the front, though, so I looked to the horizontal design for ideas on that. The horizontal design, while pretty, has a logo on the bottom (and a changing one, at that) and the Penguin Books rhomboid up top, which I also didn't want. I knew I did want a different logo than the ashmouth one, to set this series apart but I still wanted it to be both visually and thematically linked to ashmouth books. the Pelican logo is really ugly, if you ask me, being stylistically also very different from the Penguin logos, but it's a) a bird and b) starts with P (Penguin also has the Puffin imprint for children's books), so there's a theme there.
Ashmouth comes from![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
greaseonmymouth, my tumblr handle, which in turn came from this quote in Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett:
Ash hands or variations thereof sounded silly so when I started binding books I decided to link it to my tumblr handle but with a twist, so: ashmouth books was born. I returned to this quote for inspiration for the imprint and landed on 'urchin', which I liked because it's a word typically used for unruly children of various sorts, streetwise little thieves and homeless bastards, what have you - but also just somebody misbehaving. I thought it'd be funny to use that because I'm riffing on a design that's considered a hallmark of quality literature and I'm attaching an 'ugly' word to it, because the whole point of the exercise is to wrap it around fanfiction. I love it.
The final thing I did was decide on typefaces. the horizontal design eventually settled on Gill Sans (bold, regular, and light) for the cover copy and so did I, and for a steady period of time the interior text was typeset in Plantin, and so did I.
This is the design I wound up with:
- vertical colour blocks
- a single black rule along the bottom (where the Penguin vertical designs had two rules, one at the bottom and one at the top)
- title in Gill Sans bold and author in Gill Sans regular
- the imprint name in Gill Sans light and in colour in the space where the Penguin logo would have gone
- on the back cover, the publisher name (ashmouth books) at the top, in Gill Sans bold and in colour
- at the bottom I added, in Gill Sans light and in colour, the fandom info and the AO3 archive warnings
- on the spine, the imprint logo and title/author name. (the penguin spines seem to not be able to make up their minds whether the title or the author is in black or white, I decided on white for the title and black for the author.)
- the dustjacket has flaps with extra information, on the back flap is the urchin number (the penguin classics are also numbered). the front flap has author info, the back flap has a pull quote from the fic.
- the various penguin covers often had a bit of extra info or a quote or attribution on the front cover below the title and author, I decided to utilise the space instead of leaving it blank, for either pull quotes or simple b/w illustrations relevant to the fic.
a final note on colour. also in the mystery box was a gorgeous turquoise that they had given me almost 3 metres of (it was 1.5m wide) and I knew I had to use it for this series as well. I had some lovely yellow as well, and a bright green cut so narrow it won't fit anything but A6 or A7 sized books to begin with:
A5 sized books will be orange, A6 sized books will be either yellow or turqoise (random, just according to what I feel like doing for a particular fic) and the A7 sized ones will be green.
And here are, finally, the first three urchins in the series!
I don't have very many process photos as I was too busy actually putting the books together, but here's the finished first case of the first book, and the textblock next to it:
process of making the second case:
I did a paper infill between the book cloth spine and fore-edges in the same paper, both to smooth out the covers, avoiding a visible overlap of the paper and the bookcloth (I had accounted for 2mm overlap on either edge) and to make sure the greyboard wouldn't be visible through the paper once pasted down. I cut a 80mm spacer out of some very transparent paper I had to cut out the cover pages (the jacket file, but minus the colour blocks). I placed the spacer by eyeballing it and I then placed the cut covers on the case again by eyeballing it, save for the one guide I had in place to ensure each cover would line up both with each other and with the dustjacket, once printed, like so:
3rd urchin dustjacket printed, before wrapping around the case:
my printer can't print to the edge so each flap edge has a 5mm no-print edge. these are the limitations, alas. I didn't trim it off.
I had a VERY busy two days putting these together, lol. I had actually printed the textblock for The Constellation of Touch back in November but then it sat untouched as I had to put my energy into the Renegade Exhange bindings, and then by January I was just too exhausted to get back to it, and then Bologna and Bologna prep happend, and THEN I was putting all my energy into finishing the binding for hte Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition. (I'll share photos of that as soon as I'm able, I'm not sure what the levels of secrecy are.)
I'm very happy with these, and yes, they are all three Daredevil fics. in November when I put the designs together and the plans for the initial Urchins I was DEEP in my Daredevil bullshit (not that I'm not still! but you know what I mean). So it's part coincidence that they're all Matt/Foggy fake dating fics, and part an active desire on my part to NOT put any significance into which fic is The Very First Urchin (unlike how Penguin puts significance into which books are numbers so and so).
I never did anything with the idea because the thought of making a case that has horizontal stripes was just a nightmare, you'd have to fit together three different strips across a spine piece and two boards and have them line up and I just... no. I never let go of the idea though, and then in October Ratchford had their annual October sale. I ordered a bunch of things including a mystery box of book cloth - their mystery boxes are great value for money so long as one doesn't mind surprises! I got metres upon metres of book cloth in various colours and makes, including a gorgeous bright orange in a shade very reminiscent of that Penguin Orange.
My next step was to get a copy of Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 by Phil Baines - this was on our curriculum as suggested reading at Stirling but I didn't look too closely at it since book design wasn't a field I was going to go into. I also knew (largely because it had been covered at Stirling) that this was the best resource on Penguin cover designs short of visiting the Penguin Archives or going back to Stirling to study *their* collection of Penguins. But I read this cover to cover, making notes as I went along, going back to read sections in more detail, studying the photos of the covers closely, and so on.
And then I set to figuring out a design that paid homage to Penguin while also:
1) be disting from existing designs
2) be cohesive and recognisable; it should look like it *could* have been a Penguin design
3) be suitable for what I had in mind as the design had to work for fanfic, not tradpub fiction
4) be suitable as an imprint of my own "press"; everything I bind gets an ashmouth books imprint logo and this had to fit under that
without paraphrasing the entire book, here are photos of the main designs I took inspiration from.
the main horizontal design that became known in our collective consciousness as The Penguin Classics Design. they had different colours for different genres - green was for Crime, for example.
at one point they branched out into a vertical design:
and during the war they launched a specific Penguin Specials line that specialised in non-fiction about the war, these were very quick books that were commissioned and turned around in a matter of weeks.
And here's the Pelican imprint, a non-fiction series:
The funniest (and most frustrating?) thing about the history of Penguin covers is that the covers weren't actually all that consistent. even within the same design archetype you would run into variations and you had designers and publishers make decisions to change so and so for the better or worse. The design we're seeing on tote bags and mugs today is a stylised modern version of the old horizontal designs, yes, but it's also a standardised design.
Anyway. I played around with some ideas and eventually decided I wanted to model mine primarily after the vertical design, simply because it would be easier to bind - it would be like a half bound book, only I would also be covering the fore-edge with book cloth (a quarter bound book has the spine and the corners covered with book cloth or leather and a paper covering on the rest, I'm not sure if there's a term for the kind where the fore-edge is covered). I didn't like the chaotic and inconsistent typefaces and illustrations on the front, though, so I looked to the horizontal design for ideas on that. The horizontal design, while pretty, has a logo on the bottom (and a changing one, at that) and the Penguin Books rhomboid up top, which I also didn't want. I knew I did want a different logo than the ashmouth one, to set this series apart but I still wanted it to be both visually and thematically linked to ashmouth books. the Pelican logo is really ugly, if you ask me, being stylistically also very different from the Penguin logos, but it's a) a bird and b) starts with P (Penguin also has the Puffin imprint for children's books), so there's a theme there.
Ashmouth comes from
I left the medic room with ash on my hands and grease on my mouth and my heart clamped round with iron wire, the sort they used to keep urchins out of the shops in Molly.
Ash hands or variations thereof sounded silly so when I started binding books I decided to link it to my tumblr handle but with a twist, so: ashmouth books was born. I returned to this quote for inspiration for the imprint and landed on 'urchin', which I liked because it's a word typically used for unruly children of various sorts, streetwise little thieves and homeless bastards, what have you - but also just somebody misbehaving. I thought it'd be funny to use that because I'm riffing on a design that's considered a hallmark of quality literature and I'm attaching an 'ugly' word to it, because the whole point of the exercise is to wrap it around fanfiction. I love it.
The final thing I did was decide on typefaces. the horizontal design eventually settled on Gill Sans (bold, regular, and light) for the cover copy and so did I, and for a steady period of time the interior text was typeset in Plantin, and so did I.
This is the design I wound up with:
- vertical colour blocks
- a single black rule along the bottom (where the Penguin vertical designs had two rules, one at the bottom and one at the top)
- title in Gill Sans bold and author in Gill Sans regular
- the imprint name in Gill Sans light and in colour in the space where the Penguin logo would have gone
- on the back cover, the publisher name (ashmouth books) at the top, in Gill Sans bold and in colour
- at the bottom I added, in Gill Sans light and in colour, the fandom info and the AO3 archive warnings
- on the spine, the imprint logo and title/author name. (the penguin spines seem to not be able to make up their minds whether the title or the author is in black or white, I decided on white for the title and black for the author.)
- the dustjacket has flaps with extra information, on the back flap is the urchin number (the penguin classics are also numbered). the front flap has author info, the back flap has a pull quote from the fic.
- the various penguin covers often had a bit of extra info or a quote or attribution on the front cover below the title and author, I decided to utilise the space instead of leaving it blank, for either pull quotes or simple b/w illustrations relevant to the fic.
a final note on colour. also in the mystery box was a gorgeous turquoise that they had given me almost 3 metres of (it was 1.5m wide) and I knew I had to use it for this series as well. I had some lovely yellow as well, and a bright green cut so narrow it won't fit anything but A6 or A7 sized books to begin with:
A5 sized books will be orange, A6 sized books will be either yellow or turqoise (random, just according to what I feel like doing for a particular fic) and the A7 sized ones will be green.
And here are, finally, the first three urchins in the series!
I don't have very many process photos as I was too busy actually putting the books together, but here's the finished first case of the first book, and the textblock next to it:
process of making the second case:
I did a paper infill between the book cloth spine and fore-edges in the same paper, both to smooth out the covers, avoiding a visible overlap of the paper and the bookcloth (I had accounted for 2mm overlap on either edge) and to make sure the greyboard wouldn't be visible through the paper once pasted down. I cut a 80mm spacer out of some very transparent paper I had to cut out the cover pages (the jacket file, but minus the colour blocks). I placed the spacer by eyeballing it and I then placed the cut covers on the case again by eyeballing it, save for the one guide I had in place to ensure each cover would line up both with each other and with the dustjacket, once printed, like so:
3rd urchin dustjacket printed, before wrapping around the case:
my printer can't print to the edge so each flap edge has a 5mm no-print edge. these are the limitations, alas. I didn't trim it off.
I had a VERY busy two days putting these together, lol. I had actually printed the textblock for The Constellation of Touch back in November but then it sat untouched as I had to put my energy into the Renegade Exhange bindings, and then by January I was just too exhausted to get back to it, and then Bologna and Bologna prep happend, and THEN I was putting all my energy into finishing the binding for hte Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition. (I'll share photos of that as soon as I'm able, I'm not sure what the levels of secrecy are.)
I'm very happy with these, and yes, they are all three Daredevil fics. in November when I put the designs together and the plans for the initial Urchins I was DEEP in my Daredevil bullshit (not that I'm not still! but you know what I mean). So it's part coincidence that they're all Matt/Foggy fake dating fics, and part an active desire on my part to NOT put any significance into which fic is The Very First Urchin (unlike how Penguin puts significance into which books are numbers so and so).
