Leveling up the D&D core rulebooks

December 23, 2024 5:46 PM

A bookbinder's epic quest to combine the three core rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons into one huge medieval style tome. 1: Unbinding. 2: Prep & Re-Sewing. 3: Edges & Edgebands. 4: Finale

Bonus: Making The Metallic Beholder Escutcheon

posted by Lemkin (10 comments total)

Given how bad the bindings are on the actual books, this is an excellent idea. Too late for my poor monster manual though. Looking forward to watching all of these!
posted by meinvt at 6:22 PM on December 23 [2 favorites]

He rolled a 20 on his skill check.
posted by oddman at 7:24 PM on December 23 [1 favorite]

This was fascinating! It also caused me to go check my books. WotC definitely changed vendors and processes, because my Monster Manual was held together entirely with glue, no stitching at all, which is likely why it started failing after a few years of use. It is interesting and surprising that the different books had different stitching patterns. I wonder why.
posted by meinvt at 8:27 PM on December 23 [1 favorite]

Even worse than the Monster Manuals were the Monstrous Compendiums, where TSR just gave you three ring binders that you could fill up... in theory a neat idea, in practice a nightmare of torn pages.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:08 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

My book-binding days coincided with my son's Judge Dredd days. For Christmas, when The Boy was 14, I snuck off with the year's 2000ADs and sewed them up in a case-binding covered in purple library cloth with his name and "2000 AD" in gold on the spine. We were both delirah with the outcome. A few years later a miserable fuck one of his friends, not sure which, made off with the book . . . because they liked it too.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:02 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

I subscribed to this channel after watching this series some time ago. Thank you for linking it, Lemkin!

A day with a Four Keys Book Arts upload is a joy. His latest journey to Scotland to find a book to bind, and then binding it, is just as rewarding as all the rest. Always getting better. Best of the web!
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 1:35 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

For practical purposes, I wouldn't necessarily want to haul that tome around, but DAMN, that thing is beautiful! Amazing work.
posted by hydra77 at 6:09 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

There is a billionaire nerd who will pay $250k for this thing, which is probably only a3x markup on the labor.
posted by MattD at 6:40 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

I don't have the time for the whole project so I just did some random clicking to get a sense of it ... it's worth your time to go to the 34:30 mark in the last video to see him unveil the finishing touch. And at the end of that video there's a ~3 minute flashback of all the stages of the project.

Also: "I'm just a guy in a shed, making YouTube videos and trying to do cool things." Indeed.
posted by martin q blank at 6:54 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

Binding a real D&D tome is 100x cooler than forging a real D&D sword. Thanks for sharing this, Lemkin.
posted by straight at 9:01 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]