This pair of bindings were created for two works of Xena fan fiction set in ancient Greece. The books were by different authors (one was a by a single author, the other was a collection of short stories by several different authors). My customer wanted the set to "go together" but not match.
It is rare that I bind a book with printed pages, but this customer was excellent at understanding what I needed in terms of layout. She created a PDF file of all the pages which was sent electronically to a local printer for printing on the appropriate paper. The individual pages were then sewn together on an oversewing machine - a very durable form of sewing.
My customer wanted an ancient-looking coin on the front cover with a female profile and some Greek-looking writing. I'm a low-intermediate metalsmith, so, even though wax carving is not a huge strength of mine, I decided to try carving the coin out of wax so that it could be cast in real sterling silver. This was accomplished only with the help and guidance of my first-rate metalsmithing instructor Robert Laible at Robert's Jewlery in Champaign, Illinois (thanks Robert!!!!). I created the wax carving and provided the silver for casting and Robert cast the coin, then made a mould so the cast could be repeated for the second book cover. This coin is fairly large & heavy. It was accented with silverblack oxidizer to bring out the recessed areas of the coin. This coin was permanently mounted into a circular recessed area on the covers.
The cover is dark green pigskin leather with raised cords on the spine, silver lettering, and pewter decoration. I was very happy with how this not-quite-identical set turned out, and liked the two different sizes of the books. The price on this set reflected the large amount of time spent carving the coin from wax as well as the cost of the sterling silver used to cast it (time spent casting, cleaning, polishing, etc., etc.).