Adding ribbons to 40K books

This was last night’s project:

Pretty simple to do, and it adds lots of ready-make, easy access bookmarks for my games to reduce page-flipping!

Not only do these improve the look of the Warhammer: 40,000 rulebooks with the old-school gothic look to them, they’re functional and helpful too! I like to have a ribbon on the wargear page, specific units and special rules pages, and a ribbon lets you color-code what you’re looking for so you can cut down on page-flipping during a game.

How I did this was pretty easy, I could do a video on it but it’s very simple all the same:

  1. get a spool of ribbon from a craft store, ideally 6mm for normal codexes but I could only find 9mm ribbon. I got four different colors to match the look and style of 40K but you can get sparkly white if you want!
  2. measure out about 40cm or 15 inches and cut the ribbons at an angle – the angle lets you get the tip of the ribbon in the binding and also looks nice at the other end. Cut as many ribbons as you have books. I had 7 books to do and have LOTS of leftover ribbon left, so you could do your whole collection if you want, probably!
  3. I use a glue called Goop to glue the first ribbon in – you can use Shoe Goo (look online or in a skater/bmx shop). I’m not sure how strong tacky/PVA glue is but it could work. Goop and Shoe Goo are really strong glues, and can attach anything to anything, so it’s perfect to attach the first ribbon. To stuff the ribbon in, use a wooden coffee stirrer to push the tip of the ribbon into the spine of the book, behind the fabric & glue bit where the pages are actually attached together. Then press firmly on the back side of the ribbon to smoosh the glue in. Like I said above, 6mm is the better width for a normal codex but the 9mm width is fine too, just try to fold the ribbon so the curved bit faces the outside of the book, it’ll just look neater.
  4. With the other ribbons, I used fabric glue to attach them in the same way, but you can try tacky PVA glue and see how strong that is. With the ribbons in place you should be able to pull the ribbon and open the book with just the ribbon, so it needs to be glued in nicely!
  5. I glued in the black ribbon last on most of my books so the books look nice and consistent (grimdark!). The ribbon also helps pull my hardcover 7th edition book out of the slipcase nicely!

 

2 comments

  • artemi

    This looks nice! Could we perhaps get a few shots of the binding location itself? I can’t quite mentally picture how you’ve got them smooshed/stacked in there! I’d be worried this would pull out the binding, since there isn’t really a gap between the fabric and the hardback. I assume this isn’t the case?

    • admin

      Sorry for the very late reply! Basically I just crammed in the ribbons with a fork handle or a popsicle stick, the bind is fine and book binding glue is really really strong stuff 🙂

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