Ushul the Wise Leatherbound Book Replica

Concept

Some years ago I had the notion to write a fantasy story with an original setting. Inspired by JRR Tolkien, I set about planning the whole world from its creation through centuries of history, charting the rise and fall of empires and heroes. Ultimately, I still haven’t written that novel (yet), but I have written a whole encyclopedia of information about the world and its comings and goings. To make it more grounded and to feel more alive, I started writing the journal of a specific character, a traveling scholar named Ushul. In a masterstroke of procrastination, I decided to make a detour into the art of bookbinding to build a replica of Ushul’s journal.

Method

I’ve dabbled in book binding before mostly making small booklets of D&D supplements. In high school, I remade the cover of my Bible with leather because the original binding had worn out and was falling apart. This was a much larger undertaking, though.

It started with a whole lot of 11”x17” printer paper, which I carefully tore narrow strips off the edges to give them an irregular, tattered look which I learned is also called deckeled edges. Once all the sheets were torn I stacked them in groups of four and folded them in half to be approximately 8.5”x11”. Each of these groups is called a signature, in the bookbinding arts. I then soaked the signatures in leftover coffee with a bit of tumeric added, air dried for a couple days, and then baked them in low oven to make sure they were all thoroughly dry and crisp. A few days clamped between a couple boards helped flatten the pages out again.

A 3D printed jig made it easy to punch a series of holes along the fold of each signature. With the signatures punched and stacked neatly, I used a long needle and some strong embroidery thread to stitch the signatures together. A healthy coating of glue and a strip of thin cotton fabric glued down over the stiches bound the signatures together. All that left was the cover.

Like most of my prop-making projects, this became an exercise in buying as few things as possible. The leather was from a bag of scraps, the boards were leftovers from another project, the metal hardware was doodads I had lying around. I cut two pieces of thin fiberboard to about the size of the front and back covers, coated them in rubber cement and stuck my two thinnest pieces of leather on them. A thicker strip of leather for the spine and a bit of fabric glued down to hold them all together. Then two strips of fabric glued to the bound pages and the cover, and a couple more sheets of aged deckled paper to cover the fabric.

For the corners, I had these stamped metal brackets that I affixed with small tack nails and plenty of glue to be sure. The strap to secure it shut needed to be made from two pieces stitched together.

Since the belt and cover look so different, I made it part of the narrative that Ushul received the belt from one of the desert nomads he traveled with. Physical storytelling. The prop itself tells a story of its origins, and the story is influenced by the process of creating the prop.

To distress the leather a bit, I sprayed it down with 90% isopropyl alcohol to dry it out and then went at it with a wire brush and varying grits of sandpaper. I rounded the corners of the leather, attacked the metal parts with the wire brush to scrub patina off where the metal protrudes the most, and worked the cover a while to crease and wrinkle the spine leather.

It is the front embellishments that are most interesting, though.

In my world, there’s a magical metal that can only be forged by a small number of people, and this method is a guarded royal secret. The metal is otherwise indestructible. As such, the metal is used for very important things such as providing a traveling scholar with a royal seal to prove he is traveling under the providence of the king of the largest empire in the known world. This seal features significantly in the narrative so it was important to me that it be made real.

Designing the seal was a trick itself. I ran dry of ideas and asked DALL-E to design a pewter medallion featuring a knife hovering above a hand, symbolism that is important to the empire in my story. It eventually came up with a design I liked and I set about recreating it in Blender. What I ended up doing was constructing a sort of diorama of the design and rendering out just the Z-buffer of the scene, i.e. a depth map. I found a tool that converts height maps into STLs and imported the resulting mesh back into Blender so I could touch up the model with manual sculpting, including the laborious process of carving that hammered shading into the background of the design one dot at a time. By hand. Slowly. The placard was much simpler, I simply designed it in Inkscape as a greyscale image and ran it through to same image-to-STL tool. A few hours later I had both printed in grey resin and ready for finishing.

Lately, I’ve been a bit obsessed with a technique where you paint a surface with gloss black and then rub it with graphite powder. You can then polish it to a wonderful metallic shine so good you can see your reflection in it! Of course, all the little recesses in the design remain dull and dark, providing a patina to sell the metallic look.

Conclusion

I don’t consider this project complete yet. It is my intention to actually fill in the pages with the contents of Ushul’s journal, which I have been typing out for a while. I would also like to include a number of sketches and diagrams, presumably drawn by Ushul as he explored the world.

On top of that, I want to get it autographed by Adam Savage. I should get a chance at OpenSauce 2025 this July. Adam Savage has been an inspiration since I was a kid watching Mythbusters, and today he continues to inspire me to express myself through prop-making and trying new mediums for my art. By coincidence, when I was about to stitch the signatures together I looked on YouTube for a video of the stitching process and stumbled on a recent video of Adam Savage making an antique book prop with an extremely similar process! It was the most intuitive demonstration of basic bookmaking I had found yet, and encouraged me to keep going.