Binding the Book of Magnus

The Book of Magnus is a tome containing the collected knowledge and experience of Magnus the Red gathered during the Great Crusade. It is the most complete works on psykers, witchcraft and sorcery in the galaxy and is protected by powerful psychic wards making it’s pages impervious to fire. Since the fall of the Thousand Sons the book has become unbound by physics; it’s shape and size changes constantly and the words and symbols inscribed on it’s pages crawl and shift as though alive.

All of this is impressive and interesting, but makes it quite difficult to craft a physical object.

Unfortunately, the only real reference image I can rely on is the book from the model itself, which lacks detail. However this gives plenty of space for creativity, which is awesome! 

When I first decided to make an Ahriman cosplay it was a bit of a daunting prospect. Most of the skills required to create it are things I have never done. So to build confidence I decided to start with the book. I have bound books before and am happy with my ability to pull off it’s construction. 

The model is reasonably square, but I decided to bind the book in landscape slightly smaller than A4 size. As this will be mounted on my hip for the cosplay I wanted the book to look large, but not feel too bulky. I thought this would be a good compromise.

 For materials I took a trip to a local print maker and fancy paper dealer. I found a beautiful off-white paper in a lovely weight that wouldn’t show too much ink through when I wrote on it, and discovered a book cloth that is both red and blue to call back to the changing colour schemes of the Thousand Sons. The rest of the raw materials were a book board for the covers, binders twine, headbands, wax, cotton cord, pretty ribbon and a large amount of PVA glue. Plus some colourful swirly paper to be the endpapers. 

With all ingredients assembled it was time to start binding the book! 

The first step to assembling the book block was preparing the paper to form the signatures. I measured and cut the pages by hand using a scalpel and metal ruler so that I could achieve the strange oblong shape I chose for the book.

I left the edges raw as the uneven pages add to the mystic feeling of the book. Also I was far too lazy to trim them, but the roughness does genuinely add to the magical aesthetic! 

With the paper prepared it was time to mould it into a bookish shape. 

I grouped the paper into stacks of four and folded them neatly in half with my bone folder to get a nice crisp fold. This formed the stack of signatures that would make up the pages. 

I then measured out the cord spacing and punched holes for the binding with an awl. This was mostly a process of laying the cord across the spine of the signatures until it looked about right then shuffling them into even spacing with aid of a ruler. Punching holes with an awl is always a little nerve-wracking for me as there’s no reversing holes in paper. But I have to admit that it is always kindof fun as well!

Next up was binding the signatures together. I rigged up a dodgy binding rack under a table in my lounge room to hold the cord taught then I got to stitching. Turned out this was a BAD PLAN! I needed to stoop under the table to reach the block, so my posture was terrible, and I banged my head on the under side of the table many times while threading together the signatures. But we got there in the end! I was very thankful when I could finally pull the book block free.

I used a kettle stitch with thick waxed thread to lock the signatures together. It’s a pretty simple stitch, but very effective at locking the signatures together. Instead of a straight needle I used a chunky curved one as I find that easier to use for this purpose. 

Next it was time for power tools! I drilled holes through the book boards with a dremel to thread the cord through. This involved getting a backing block and clamping the book board to it as to not drill a hole in my floor. I clamped the board to the block then put it on an angle to drill. I’m actually surprised at how well this worked.

I made sure the hole was drilled at a bit of an angle to reduce the size of the insertion and exit point of the cord. It’s quite chunky cord as I wanted the gorgeous bumpy texture on the spine, but not for the inside of the book. Hence the angle.

Once I’d pulled the cord through the drill holes I frayed it out into a fan to spread it’s bulk out a little. This was in an effort to both make the inside covers as smooth as possible and to give it a better hold so the covers wouldn’t fall off. Once I was happy with the amount of fraying I drowned it in PVA glue to keep it in place. This cord soaked up a lot of glue, but I just kept mooshing it in there until it was saturated. 

At this point I also stuck the endpapers in to connect the cover and book block. This was a bad plan and is not the right order to do things in! It caused me issues down the line.

To add to the huge quantity of glue holding the frayed cord to the inside of the cover I also heaped PVA glue on the book’s spine to give it extra strength, plus a small strip of linen from another project for structure.  

Then it was time to add in the first pretty details! Pretty details are my favourite part of craft projects and there will be a lot on this book. These particular pretty details were ribbon book marks and headbands. I picked a nice dark red colour of ribbon to contrast the mostly blue covers and match with the headbands.

I stuck down the headbands first, then the two ribbon bookmarks. The tiny plastic reference book doesn’t have any ribbon bookmarks, but I’m not passing up this opportunity to be extra. I glued the ribbon right down the spine to give them a solid anchor and mooshed them up against the cords to make sure there was lots of contact points for the glue to take hold.

Then I put extra glue on top of that to be sure. Of course!

Next was to actually cover the book. I cut the book cloth to shape, then put a mountain of glue on the book boards to hold it in place. I used my bone folder to smooth the cloth over the boards so there were no bubbles, then neatly folded the corners of the cloth into place around the boards, again using the bone folder. Before the glue dried I tied some left over cording around the spine to squish the cloth in place around the spine bumps. 

Then it was time to fix my error with the endpapers. As parts of the book cloth were now covering the gorgeous placed to connect the book block to the boards on the other side as well as adding in extra fanciness.

And that was the base book structure done! The rest is decoration, which is the best part! The model has an ouroboros in the middle and flame looking shapes around the edges. But while I was thinking about how to tackle those, I decided to put little weights at the end of the bookmarks.

I took designs from the decorations on Ahriman’s helmet, freehanded them onto baking paper, cut them out of worbla and then sandwiched the end of the ribbon between the two pieces. The details were squished in using sculpting tools, with tiny balls of worbla making the rivets. The larger bits were stitched in smaller bits as it seemed the easiest way to go about it. 

I took some liberties with the cover designs to make them fancier. The initial shapes of the border flames were freehanded onto baking paper, then transferred to worbla. I made sure to leave space for the “lock” to go on later. I relied on the stickiness of worbla to hold it in place, but also squished the edges into the fabric of the book cloth to be sure. This also created a pretty bevel effect. 

The ouroboros was a little different. I wanted to use the Thousand Sons legion symbol which is gloriously detailed, but a complete pain in the ass. I tried segmenting it out with worbla, but this just hurt my hands and looked messy. After some thinking I cut the whole shape out of craft foam, covered it on worbla, marked where the segments would be, then used sculpting tools to squish in the details.     

Then it was time to paint! Ended up using Citadel paint as so little paint was needed. Also used the same techniques I used to paint miniatures, only on a larger scale. There’s a primer coat of black, then a base coat of Retributor Gold, a wash of Reikland Flesh Shade, a drybrush of Retributor Gold to bring back the shininess using my arm as a pallet, and finally a tiny bit of Nuln Oil in the corners of the bevel to add some shadows. Of course it was then all sealed to keep the paint intact.   

And with the last coat of sealer it was done! Well, all except the lock to close the book, but that will be put in place later. I intend to use this book to track my progress on my planned Ahriman cosplay, so I expect with photos, samples and anything else stuck on the pages it may end up being a bit thicker, so I’ll fit the lock later when I know it’ll fit!

Overall I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. It may not actually be magical, but it is quite shiny! And it will make for a very fancy project log book. My very own Book of Magnus!