In search of the Dark Tower

Craft
Published

May 16, 2020

Project date: December 2017

After reading ‘The Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King, I found out about a novella “Little Sisters of Eluria” set just before “The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger”. I just had to get my hands on a copy, so I searched the web and found a free online version of the novella.

However, I wanted a physical copy, and so I ordered a copy from Amazon. When it arrived, I opened it, and it was a comic (note the “marvel” logo in the top-left image of the collage below)!

I really wanted the novella, so I continued my web search that led me to a website where I again purchased what I thought was the novella. The parcel that arrived was a tube, which seemed incredibly strange. Opening the tube and tipping the contents out yielded a dust cover!

After the feeling of disappointment had faded, Eureka! Free online version + dust cover = bind my own book. The steps involved:

  1. Copy the text from the free website into LaTeX files
  2. Use pdfpages package to print the book formatted into signatures
  3. Stitch the signatures together
  4. Make a cloth covered hard cover
  5. Make a pouch to hold “The Gunslinger”
  6. Combine all the elements

It turns out that the dust cover was for a special hard-back edition that included “Little Sisters of Eluria” along with “The Gunslinger”, and hence, the dust cover spine was bigger than the printed pages of the novella. So, in step 1 above, I increased the text size to end up with more pages. The combined signatures was still too thin, so I decided to create a pouch to hold my copy of “The Gunslinger”.



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