The first step was to define the size of the book.

I had a couple pieces of plywood that I bought to make shelves but never used so I decided to used that to make the covers since they looked quite similar to the size of book shown in the movie.

So I took the width of that piece and calculated the height based on photos of other props. Always check you leftovers before making too many measurements, usually there’s something already perfect!

Once the covers were ready, the next step pas to make the curved marks on them.

I copied the very rough lines to a piece of paper based on a couple of photos of one of the many props floating on the internet. Then I copied it to the piece of plywood by hand, nothing to precise.

Then I used the router head of the dremel and created the grooves on the cover.

For the internal pages, I first started gathering photos of props. I much later realized that all pages from this book are supposed to be made out of obsidian or black stone, but I for some reason found these photos first:

I really liked the golden finish so I didn’t give more thought and went on to make them a light color. I bet the original prop was supposed to be made out of gold or brass but I didn’t have such materials handy so I decided to make my pages out of wood. It wasn’t as impressive, but I thought wood pages would still be cool and somehow on-theme.

I once again went into my trusty pile of leftover pieces of wood and took out a couple of very old pieces I also kept with no exact objective up until now:

Those also got cut into the 6 rectangles the same size as the cover:

Every piece of wood was covered in Mod Podge in order to transfer the photocopies we made of every page:

Once the paper (with the toner side down) has dried it’s time to take the paper out with water and leave the toner stuck to the page:

The we aged a bit the wood with coffee:

And finally, the pages get a couple hands of varnish to seal the toner:

Then everything has to dry, we didn’t had much space so they had to go dry on top of our tools…

And with that, the covers and pages are done for now so its time to build the clasp system and the other decorations, see you soon!