Fan made Lord of the Rings illustrated by Ted Nasmith

The following comes from fellow fan Joshua Storms over on Facebook (with his permission), and I am quite impressed! Amazing work for a first-time bookbinding project and it looks fantastic.

I just wanted to share some images of a personal project I recently completed for myself. I’ve always wanted an illustrated version of LotR by Ted Nasmith. He’s done enough paintings for one, but since I wasn’t sure if that will ever be published, and I wanted a version that my wife and kids would enjoy, I decided to make one!
I took an extra copy of the 50th edition and added 115 illustrations to it as well as a couple maps by Francesca Baerald for the end pages. Of course this meant having to disassemble the book and rebuild it from the ground up. Seeing as I’ve never made a book before, I thoroughly enjoyed my time doing research on YouTube to figure out all the steps. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Anyway I just wanted to share to encourage your creativity, and I’m glad to have found this podcast community!

An additional note on his method used for the gilt/titles:

I created the designs in Illustrator and used a Cricut to cut it all out on “Easy Weed” metallic heat transfers.
Then I used a small 2” iron and a wide head bit on my wood burning tool to carefully bond it to the leather (with thin cotton fabric in between to make sure it didn’t heat too quickly). You want to heat it just long enough to see some leather texture showing through the foil for a good bond. This proved to be a very satisfactory method, and the closest solution I could find for someone who doesn’t have the means to do gold foil stamping.