Hear a Song This Deeply


I typeset so_shhy's Hear a Song This Deeply for daemonluna in the Renegade Bindery typesetting exchange in 2022, and finally bound my own copy of it a year later.

This is one of my favorite modern cultivation AUs – it revolves around Lan Wangji trying to recreate the Lan Sect’s musical cultivation techniques from the past, which have been lost to history. For the typeset, I used some “sound wave” stock vectors, and drew a sort of music-staff-thing for the chapter headers (inspired by some imagery from the webcomic Girl Genius).

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the cover, which was part of why it took me so long to get around to it, but then I saw a paste paper cover design in an old bookbinding exhibition book and got inspired to do a similar flowing musical staff design with paste paper. Paste paper is basically like fingerpainting but without the preschool associations. In this case I applied the paste in a gradient, and used a piece of chipboard I’d cut into a fork shape to make the pattern. I think if I’d planned the whole book in one go, I’d have kept the musical notation to just the cover, and used a different chapter header, maybe a nice pic of instruments or something.

I decided to try marbling the page edges and ended up getting the book too wet, so the fore-edge is a little wrinkly inside. But it’s still readable and I learned what not to do next time!

The fonts used in this project are Son of Time for the titles, Newt Serif for the body, and Konanur for the initials.


© 2025 E. Hyde