The Bookbinder

by Pip Williams

Those who want to know what Shakespeare thinks must not neglect what his fools say.

but bonefolders, like wooden spoons and axe handles, wear the character of their owner’s grasp.

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.

She liked this conversation, and I had stopped resisting it. Pretend you’re on the stage, Tilda had once said. Deliver your lines each night with the same enthusiasm. Your audience will be putty in your hands.

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

would never imagine all the hands their book had been through, all the folding and cutting and beating it had endured. They would never guess how noisy and smelly the life of that book had been before it was put in their hands.

‘And this will last a hundred, at least,’ I said. ‘We’ll be dust.’ He nodded. ‘Don’t mind the thought.’ ‘Being dust?’ I smiled. ‘Someone from the future holding my work.’ ‘I like it too, Eb. But I doubt anyone thinks about the people who’ve bound their books.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t need them to know who I am.’ ‘I do,’ I said. It just came out and I didn’t really understand what it meant.

Your stitching is what will hold the story together, Ma had said, just when I wanted to give up trying.

‘If you bind the sections well enough,’ I said, ‘your work will be invisible.’

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. The process of stitching can become an act of reverence, and when there are more sections on the frame than on the bench, you begin to anticipate the moment the parts become a whole.

as a new idea, an argument of some kind, a redress or correction. My mind ran along like a train. The myriad ways our words had failed to be bound. And here they were, finally. And there was only one bloody copy.

‘Thank her,’ I said. ‘Miss Nicoll.’ For the words, I might have said; for collecting them, understanding them, giving them the time of day.

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

‘Water, water everywhere, Miss Bruce, nor any drop to drink.’ She smiled. ‘Coleridge,’ she said. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’

‘You’ve been robbed of his experience. And Jack’s been robbed of sharing the burden.

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. Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. She broke it down so that each phrase could be understood as an articulation of something singular. The truth of what she said could be inconvenient; sometimes it made life easier to misunderstand her.

You smell like a new book – it’s positively intoxicating.’

Edith Cavell,’

If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.

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

she had been deliberate in her acquisitions, so many of her books were on Gwen’s list.

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.’

I was about to close the book when I saw a note written in the white space at the end of the chapter. It was in pencil, a scrawl I had to decipher: It’s all Greek to me, it said. Beneath it, another hand had written, Me too. Beneath that, a third hand: What’s the point?

The truth was, I couldn’t shake the thrill of the experience. My opinion had been sought – no, my educated opinion had been sought – and I had brought everything to my answer. Not just the ideas of others, but my own.

Just promise to look up from the books occasionally. I’ve always thought the blossoms of spring as stimulating for the intellect as any text.’

‘The final hurdle awaits,’ she said. ‘Now is not the time to shy away.’

‘And to be honest, the only way to know what Homer wrote is to learn the language that Homer wrote in, otherwise you are at the mercy of the translator, their times, their perspective. Their gender,’ she said.

‘The words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. They also’ – and again she poked at the translations – ‘tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Gwen. ‘Your brain has gone on strike. It requires a little recreation.’

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

‘As good as any of them,’ she said in my ear. Ma had said the same to Maude, a thousand times. The memory of it filled my lungs with a trembling breath because Maude had always believed her. But I never had.

Some things have to be voiced over and over, they have to be shared and understood, they have to echo through time until they become truth and not just fancy.

Women in the Bookbinding Trade by Mary Van Kleeck (1913).

Mick Belson’s wonderful book On the Press, and May Wedderburn Cannan’s book Grey Ghosts and Voices.