The Bookbinder of Jericho

by Pip Williams

I held the book to my nose: clean leather and the fading scent of ink and glue. I never tired of it. It was the freshly minted smell of a new idea, an old story, a disturbing rhyme.

‘The door will not stay open for long, Peggy. You must try to slip in while you can.’

Why do we have so many books? I liked to ask. To expand your world, she would always say.

When she died, my world shrank.

‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, but then begins a journey in my head.’

Summer mornings had no manners; they slipped beneath our curtains and roused a winged chorus, and I was awake long before I wanted to be.

There is satisfaction in sewing the parts of a book together. Binding one idea to the next, one word to another, reuniting sentences with their beginnings and ends.

England may be proud to die; but surely her time is not yet.

the best contraception is a professional manner and a face free of make-up.

‘We are to be friends, Peggy. What do you think of that?’ said Gwen. I thought it unlikely. ‘I’m sure we’ll get on famously,’ I said.

When a privilege is unfairly denied, Tilda liked to say, then it must be taken.

‘Butter makes everything taste good,’ said Lotte. ‘Garlic makes everything taste better.’

It is not your job to think, Miss Jones. And it never bloody would be, I thought.

She had a confidence that came from having had doors held open for her, literally and figuratively, all her life.

‘I’m afraid I shall drown in my tears,’

She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant.

Any couple trying to wrest a day from the war.

‘Poetry is how we endure the unendurable. Sometimes it has to be a lie.’

If these were the scars war left on the skin, what must it leave on the soul?

Her show would go on as long as there was adequate applause.

‘That it was a woman’s place to inspire stories, not to write them.’

‘She takes up so little room,’ I said. He sighed. ‘In the end, we all do.’

When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realised they couldn’t stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine, a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realised, will have told a slightly different story.

‘If she were more perfect, she would be less interesting.’

‘That too much learning will make me lonely, send me mad and keep me poor.’

Why did we have to wait until we were dead to have our names inscribed on something?

Their lives are barely recorded, Ma had said once, when I asked what happened to the women of Troy. So their deaths aren’t worth writing about.

So say the poets, I thought. The men who hold the pen.

They will expand your world, Ma had said. But if I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t know how small my world was.

Go forth, my book, into the open day.

It was the work of cartographers. We were mapping each other’s bodies so that we might return.

‘I must have wanted you to think I was cleverer than I am.’ ‘I never thought you were cleverer than you are.’