I finally finished my bootleg copy of Minna Sundberg's epic 610 page comic A Redtail's Dream.

I don't have a ton of photos from making this one but I suppose you kind of know the steps at this point if you've read my other bookbinding posts.

This is the largest bookbinding project I've taken on (more than double my largest previous book!) and it was a fair bit of work for a few reasons I'll get into. Unlike all the previous books I've worked on, none of which ever had a physical print run, this absolutely beautiful comic actually did get a short run in 2013, through kickstarter.

I missed it. I first found the comic just a year later and I've been watching ebay and other secondhand booksellers for a chance to get a physical copy of it for the last decade. I've bought almost all her other comics but never managed to get this one.

Now that I'm bookbinding as a hobby I realized I could buy the ebook version, interpose it, and bind my own hardcover copy. I'm not sure where the legality of printing a copy of an ebook for personal use stands in my jurisdiction. I know it's not as good as if I could have bought the physical back when that was an option, but it's not, anymore, and as far as supporting the artist goes, this was actually better than buying secondhand.

The file prep went quickly, I added a few endpages but otherwise didn't mess with it. I printed it in color on 17x22" paper using an unguarded office laser printer. Overall I was quite pleased with the quality of the print though I'm sure it's not as glossy as the real thing. I used paperclips to keep each signature together as they came off the printer.

I used a straight edge and xacto knife (I actually use scalpel blades in an xacto handle) to trim each sheet so there was no whitespace at the edges. Trimming the pages was a little tedious - the printer we have access to can't print up to the edge, so we had to tinker with settings until the front and back lined up well enough (and it's always a little crooked). There's four comic pages per sheet, but four edges per page, so at least four cuts per page (more like six on average when I flipped it over and saw there was still some whitespace somewhere). So at least 610 slices with a straightedge and razor. Well worth it though, I think.

Then I folded and punched each signature, and stacked them in order. This was tricky and important because the comic didn't have page numbers and I didn't have the heart to add them over the art. So I had to keep skimming it to make sure none of the pages or sections were out of order.

When they were all finished I stitched the book block together. This took a while, partly because I kept double checking that everything was in order. As before, I followed the signature stitching layout from the Penrose Press Pretty Perfect Paperback guide.

Once it was all sewed together, I had to clamp it and glue it. This is where I ran into some issues as my original book clamp (a grubby 2x4 attached to a piece of particleboard with two wood screws) was not up to the task of clamping this giant book block. Every time I tried to tighten it down the middle slipped out like the contents of an overfull sandwich. I realized I was going to have to build a nicer book clamp which could fence in the signatures.

The final version of the book clamp was still a pretty rough and ad-hoc thing but it did allow me to tighten it down without the book block trying to escape! It used the same system of two wood screws for a tightening mechanism. The wood was all scrap I had in the pile, and the hardware was just old wood screws and new staples. Most of it went back on the pile when this book was done.

As before, I daubed on the PVA glue using my fingertips (first couple coats with the front fence bits still attached, then I removed them).

I think I applied more coats of glue than usual because I knew how much force it took to get this thing into this shape and didn't want it to come apart.

I don't know if this was the right way to do things; in the end the spine wasn't quite as even as I'd like and it was almost a centimeter thicker at the spine than at the leading edge. But I figured it was probably as good as I was going to manage with how big the book block was and how I stitched it together. The way I bind it leaves a lot of string inside the folded part of each signature (and the fold is thicker than at the other end anyways) and the more signatures you have, the worse the discrepancy in the thickness near the spine vs the leading edge gets.

Somewhere in here I glued the cheesecloth 'mull' and watercolor paper onto the spine.

The next step was fabricating the cover. From what I remember the front and back covers came from the ebook PDF (with modifications to widen them) but I had to mock up my own version of the spine based on a rough proof she posted back before the Kickstarter. I think I pulled the font from the PDF then modified some letters for the all-on-one-line layout. I honestly don't know what the actual spine of the real book ended up looking like, but that's part of the fun of a bootleg I think. I will say that one part of these DIY books I really like is the lack of logos, branding, bar codes, pages of copyright notices, etc. It feels like something from outside of the modern day.

I don't have any photos from putting the cover together but I followed the same process I talked about in previous posts. Cut the cardboard to size, lined it up with the cover, measured a lot, marked the back of the canvas, and finally glued it on. Then I flipped it over, wrapped the bleed area around the inside of the cardboard, and glued it there. Once it was dry came the scariest part of bookbinding: gluing the book block into the case. You spend a ton of time making both pieces so the stakes are high and time is short when you start slopping pva glue onto them. I checked like a dozen times that the book block was in the right way around this time, got it all positioned, felt the edges of the cover, measured where I could, made sure it fit.

Like I said before, due to the folds and stitching, the book block was shorter at the leading edge than at the spine. So in order to get the upper cover to have good contact with the top end paper, I shimmed it by tucking two magazines into the block further down.

Then I slipped in a sheet of wax paper and scrap paper, absolutely covered the endpaper and both sides of the cheescloth strip with glue, slipped out the scap paper, and closed the front cover onto the block.

Once it was stuck I cracked it open just enough to check for issues, smoothed a couple wrinkles, and put a heavy weight on the top. Once it'd had a few hours to dry I repeated the same steps for the back cover.

The end result was better than I hoped! You can definitely tell it's homemade, but it looks decent and it's solid and functional for sitting and reading a comic.

Not bad for a bootleg edition!

Edit: I looked her up separate from the comics I know her from, found some new websites, and it seems Minna Sundberg converted to Christianity in a big way in 2020, and is now a Comic Artist for Christ. Somehow I don't think she'll be republishing the comic where a Christian priest grapples with the existential horror of realizing he backed the wrong religion and his entire life's work was for nothing because we actually spend eternity sleeping under the ice. I do appreciate that she left it up at least, and I'm very glad I bound my own version of the comic.