I offered a handbound book as a prize for IFComp 2025, and wanted to share the result! Prize winner Amy Stevens gave me a transcript of her excellent The Witch Girls, which I bound into a 70 page hardback, covered with emu leather and batik paper.
Photos below (you can’t really see them but there’s a whole bunch of bats in the background of the first picture, which I thought was rather fitting)
Wow! This is amazing. Great work! And a good game to be immortalized in print.
Emu leather? You mean one of our native animals was sacrificed for this? 
For those that don’t know, the “bats” are fruit bats or flying foxes. They’re the big blobby things hanging from the trees in the background. (They’re nocturnal, so they sleep during the day.) Each fruit bat is a cute furry creature the size of a large rat, but with leathery wings, like your traditional bat, and a wing span of over 1 metre.
I didn’t know they made leather from birds… though considering the emu’s reputation(its reported the Australian military fought a war against emus and the emus won), a book bound in their hide sounds badass.
I didn’t know emu leather was a thing either until I came across some small pieces in the scrap bin at my local bookbinding guild. I’m told that people can make leather out of all sorts of creatures, even fish. (though I believe the emu war incident was more due to the emus being really good at running away and hard to shoot effectively, than any combat skills on their part)
Also, yes those are grey-headed flying foxes! Very lucky to have a big colony of them nearby, you can see hundreds flying about the park at dusk and it’s an incredible sight
This is the sort of thing you get in Dwarf Fortress after a leatherworker enters a strange mood and commandeers a workshop.
I live a couple of kilometres from a huge flying fox colony at Turrella, near Wolli Creek (inner west of Sydney for those that don’t know). There are thousands in the colony and they make a spectacular sight when they depart at dusk to go hunting further to the west. Some of them are lazy and don’t fly that far, but forage for the native fruits, seeds and nuts in our suburb. They’ll eat any fruits and they love to eat mandarins and leave the peels and half-eaten fruit that they’ve dropped all over our front path under the bottle brush tree.
It could only happen in Australia.
And now I’m wondering if the snakes native to australia provide enough variety in coloration to have a decent palette to work with for making a snake skin tapestry… and if there’s enough variation in texture across different animals to make a decent texture palette(I’ve thought of mixing different fabrics for a texture palette before, but that thought mostly stuck to plant and synthetic fibers(red flannel, orange polyester, yellow burlap, green felt, indigo(referring to the actual dye, which is closer to true blue than the blue-violet we commonly call indigo these days and I understand is closer to what was meant when ROY G. BIV was coined(I understand the blue Newton meant was closer to what we call cyan today) denim, violet velvet, white linen, brown corderoy, etc.)…
As for the Emus… Well, discretion is the better part of valor and I can respect those who win by refusing to fight(more than I would respect those who win through needless slaughter). Plus, it’s still leather made from a modern day dinosaur… even the dopey looking chicken gets at least a level of badass by association when you learn its the closest living relative of the T-rex.
