ALR: Halloween Books

This is for the fam over at r/barbie.

I can't get to my photo space to make up a step-by-step how-to. It's taken up with the trailer used for trucking fine art and historical exhibits — in 1:18. It's one of the few safe places to leave it out to dry and between steps. Cat, you know. He's actually very well-behaved, but he's only feline. This place he knows not to go! Establishing that lets me leave things set up and run to the bathroom, but it's one of the only places.

So I'll suggest a few people with high-end how-tos already. And they have free bindings to give you, but alas in 1:12. You can either make really small pocket books or blow them up, whereupon they look fuzzy and coarse. There isn't enough information in their 1:12 at only 200dpi to expand to 1:6 at 400dpi, which I kind of consider minimum.

Maria's Minis uses pages for text blocks, same as I often do. Her method is quicker and simpler than the others, including a step easier than mine. Tara McGinnis I have followed off and on for decades, and only now do I find she's into minis. Heather at Thicketworks is a long-time favorite on YouTube, and her how-tos are excellent.

For books that are not stars of the prop scene, I'm good with filling them with a block of balsa or layered foamy. I don't like fan-fold pages, though Tara and Heather both use them. They look like toddler books in photography. Great to flip through, though! And if no one would see enough of the book to know it's only a block of styrofoam, they won't know it's fan-folds, either. Tara's are fabulous fun, I have to admit, for a costumer's or art student's library.

That done, here are your JPEGs! They are supposed to be 1:6/400dpi where the detail looks good. They were built to be a 7.5x10" mass to print without bleed in most printers. Unfortunately, the server here makes them 72dpi and 28" tall, and won't take PDFs. So you can download them, take them into your graphics, and change them to 400dpi and 10" tall to recover most of the information. Worthless hosting won't take a PDF.

There's a sheet of textbooks, and one of Gilderoy Lockhart's popular tomes with some "others": an actual occult text, some blank bindings, and one marked "Spell Book."

The bright red one in the middle, next to the bottom, and the brown one right above it, are from something called Mage War, I am told. The right column, third from the bottom, is a 19th century book that looks Hogwartsy.

This last sheet has endpapers to use with my method, or Heather's or Tara's. There's also some loose pages from an actual alchemical text, and a little note on the Platonic solids, that tabletop gamers should recognize.

The endpapers can also be used for DIY bindings, plain, quarter-bound, or half-bound. If there is only one copy of a manuscript, it shouldn't be in a commercial binding unless the person was willing to pay a lot for the binding.

Have fun!

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