I rebound my 2011 memoir, Chocolate & Vicodin, as a hardback with an original cover design.
Ripping the cover off a book will never not feel weird to me, but it’s a necessary part of rebinding a paperback as a hardback. It was a weird form of micro-torture to rip the cover off my own book, but the nice thing is I instantly had a perfectly trimmed text block without having to use a needle or a craft knife. All I had to do was tip on the endpapers and glue the mull and endbands to the spine, and then it was ready for casing in.
I’d recently ditched my Adobe subscription because they have a bloodsucking business model, so I created the cover in Affinity Designer instead. It’s similar to Illustrator in a lot of ways, but figuring out how to use the different personas was the biggest learning curve, though I sorted it all out eventually. I used stock photography vector for the candies, but designed the rest myself. I used fonts that match the original paperback cover to provide a bit of continuity between editions. I tried not to include anything so intricate that it would be hard to weed the HTV. The metallic Cricut brand HTV I was using would curl if you cut a narrow strip, which is why I wouldn’t recommend that brand for detailed designs.
I was rather delighted with how well this came out. The consistent margin between the pastedowns and the edge of the cover is practically perfect! I’d also finally figured out how to fold down the corners of the bookcloth properly so there wasn’t any extra fabric jutting out. I love how well the endpapers match the cover design. This rebind is one of the most beautiful things in the world to me!
This was also the first time I felt like I might know what I was doing. I’d learned from the mistakes I’d made on other projects and was able to put together something that looked like a real book!
I’d like to make another copy of this, this time with gilded edges. If I do, I’ll be sure to post pictures.