DIY Correspondence Book with Stab Binding

How many of you out there would like to write a book someday? I'm with you. I've started lots of stories and I still hold out hope that someday I will have the time and inspiration to finish one, even if for only myself/friends. If nothing else, one November (National Novel Writing Month!) I'll FORCE myself to crank one out, even if it sucks, just to say I have. But right now with Graduate School and everything, there's just not time to sit in front of the computer trying to come up with material. I only work on fiction if I am hit with sudden inspiration. Unfortunately much of that is drained by Graduate School papers.

However, that doesn't mean I can't make other "books" in the meantime to somewhat assuage my cravings to create. Over Christmas I taped together 18 "Ancestry Books" with my and husband's immediate and extended family trees (after doing HOURS of research, making calls, and using the free trial on ancestry.com to get information) to give to my family members. They turned out cute and interesting, I think, if almost too small to read on a few pages since I printed it on 8.5 x 11 paper instead of something bigger.

I've also been working on another "book project" that I finally finished today. For this one, I already had all the text material - I just needed to format it, print it, and assemble.

I recently used Facebook's new tool to download and backup content (like messages and pictures) from my account. During our 5 years of dating, Matt and I often used Facebook to send messages to one another, especially in the early months when we normally saw each other only 2 days a week and weren't quite brave enough to call each other all the time. My parents were usually unhappy about the length of those calls once I did cross that threshold. We used Facebook like instant messaging sometimes, so there ended up being a lot of messages. Being a collector of things, such as all of Matt's letters and notes to me, of course I needed to save these messages. In the past I'd tried copy-&-pasting these to Word documents. The new "backup" tool is much more effective.

I downloaded all the messages from 2007, when we both started using Facebook, to our wedding in April of this year.

At 12-point font, there were 602 single-spaced pages.

I lowered the font size and deleted extra spaces to lower the length to a manageable size. The only bad thing was that I can see the date of each post in my download folder, but not when I copy the text over to LibreOffice Writer, the program we have on our main computer. I decided NOT to go through and type in the date for every post. That would have been a nice touch, but maddening. I did type in the name of each new month so I could keep some track of time. Then I selected all the posts from 2007 only and decided to start there, saying I'd possibly move on to later years in the future.

From just July to December 2007 takes up about 80 pages at Times New Roman 10.5. I wanted to make a small-size book, so I formatted the page landscape-wise with 2 columns. Basically most of the rest of the work consisted of making everything justified (because then it looks like a novel), formatting every line that ended a paragraph to fix the word spacing that justifying created, and tabbing in most new paragraphs by hand since it copied as straight text with almost no formatting. Whoo. Took forever.

Then the fun part. Printing each page front-and-back manually so I didn't waste paper and would have an 80-page book instead of a 160-page book.

Then came assembling the book.

Matt got me a really awesome book called Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book. It has everything you'd need to know, from ISBNs to self-publishing to design. Towards the end is a section that shows you how to create your own books on a small scale, such as with pamphlet pages or stab binding. I used stab binding to create my correspondence book:

Line up all the pages and the cover (which needs to be twice the width of a page plus the width of the stack of your pages ... my cover needed to be 11 3/8 inches because the stack was about 3/8 of an inch tall). Secure the pages and cover in place with binder clips. Measure, mark, and punch the holes. They suggest using a "screw punch." I don't have one of these and I'm impatient, so I used the long, sharp, needle-like instrument you see in the picture, which is a scrapbooking tool for poking holes. I had to hammer it through the pages and eventually do the back side as well to make the holes large enough for my needle. Still, it was hard to shove the needle through later. Make sure if you ever do this to make the holes large enough.

Thread the binding. There is a funny formula for how to bind the book to make it look uniform and sturdy. I'm not going to go into all that detail here unless someone asks. Also you can probably find out how to do stab binding online somewhere. Tip: Make sure your thread is PLENTY long enough the first time. Probably three times the length of the book is good. I just about ran out.

Tie it off and you are done! Here's my finished book that more than anything I just wanted to share with everyone after the hours of work I put into it. And I didn't even fix all our typos in the text! I decided that made it more realistic (and we apologize for them in many messages) ... plus, that would have driven me crazy. I can now look back at our messages whenever I want ... but I can also pretend that Matt and I wrote a book together. We basically did! I remember when "text message" novels for teens were kind of popular, or diary-entry novels ... this is just like that. And we didn't have to make anything up, it's all what we really wrote. Pretty fun, I think. But I'm also a hopeless romantic.