Cut Him Out in Little Stars


Cut Him Out in Little Stars by ChaoticAndrogynous is one of my favorite wangxian fics of all time. In it, Wei Wuxian is reborn as a comet. To paraphrase the comment I left when I first read it, it does such a good job conveying the enormous scale of both space and immortality. I never expected to have so many feelings about comets. And I found myself wanting to reread it almost immediately, which bumped it up in my bookbinding queue (…and then I didn’t get to binding it until a year after I typeset it, but such is life).

I had been hoarding some beautiful galaxy paper from a scrapbooking cardstock pack, and I immediately knew that this would be a perfect use for it. The title font is “Tycho’s Elegy” which is based on the handwriting of Tycho Brahe (who is not the main astronomer referenced in this fic, but he is mentioned). At any rate I think it’s a beautiful font. I found some old astronomy drawings and modified them to use for the title page and chapter headings.

The endpapers are a really cool paper where the pattern is actually made from different colors of paper fiber, rather than being a printed pattern. And as I’ve been having fun with edge foiling I decided to go ahead and add a star patterned holographic edge. I did a foil title on the front cover, but my foil quill wasn’t cooperating with the bookcloth I used, so the spine title is iron-on vinyl.

Usually I sew my books with white thread but this time I used purple (and in a case of ‘this probably amuses me and no one else,’ it appears every 24 pages, – not quite matching the 23 year orbit of Wei Wuxian's comet, but as close as I could get in a multiple of 4. And a purple ribbon for the comet's tail too!


© 2025 E. Hyde