The photos came in this week. The Aryshan War leatherbound is done, and it turned out better than I imagined.
This was not a simple project. The omnibus runs 850 pages, which puts it right at the upper threshold for what a binding can safely hold by weight. Paper selection alone took more back-and-forth than most people would expect. There are far more options than you’d think, and the wrong choice at that page count causes real problems down the line. We went through everything carefully before committing.
The Aryshan War is bound in blue pigskin and features a French groove that accentuates the natural curve of the spine. The size ruled out spine hubs and gilding because the weight of such would have caused issues for the book. The leather and the brass stamp make it look beautiful in its own right.
That stamp is the detail I am most proud of. My comic artist for the Ayla Rin comics designed it, as she did for the comic book leatherbound we produced for The Hidden Emperor campaign. It depicts an Aryshan warship scene, and it mirrors the visual language of the original paperback cover. Readers who know this universe will recognize it immediately. The end papers go further: a full star map and station layout for Palmer Station, the primary Earth space station in the series. Minor locations from the books show up on that map. The intention was to build a physical artifact that rewards people who have spent real time in this universe, not just a pretty object to put on a shelf.
That universe started in a high school English class. I wrote the first version by hand in a notebook. Sean Barrows, who became the main character of the entire trilogy, came out of those pages. The worldbuilding went through three complete drafts before the version readers know. Each one stripped what wasn’t working and rebuilt from what was. The bones of those early drafts are still in the final book. The story grew into them over a decade.
The series draws from The Vorkosigan Saga and Babylon 5 in how it builds across a multi-book arc. Scale, depth, long-pay-off character arcs. Each book in the trilogy pushes harder than the last. The conclusion earns every page that comes before it.
One thing worth being clear about: these leatherbounds are not available for purchase. The production cost is high enough that I can only produce them through crowdfunding campaigns, where a dedicated tier covers what it takes to make them. This edition came out of the Valiant Frontiers campaign, offered as a special tier for long-time readers of the Aryshan universe.
It was also the second Castalia binding we produced together. The first was the Ayla Rin comic omnibus, which combined Overmind and the Hidden Emperor into a single leatherbound volume. That remains one of the only comics ever given this treatment. Both of these exist because readers backed them into existence.
Castalia is now taking orders from publishers and independent authors for custom bindings, working through their backlog at two to three books per month. If you have a project and want to pursue something like this, the option is there. You can contact them via their Substack. They’ll even take orders of books that you might have in your collection that you want to see get this treatment. For me, getting a version of Anne McCaffrey’s The Crystal Singer might be on the horizon soon…
For me, seeing this come back from the bindery is what ten-plus years of building a science fiction universe looks like when it lands right. The quality in these photos is not luck. It is the result of caring about every decision from paper weight to end paper design to the stamp on the cover.
If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
Truly beautiful.
Excellent. This is lovely. So glad to have backed this.