The Bookbinder

by Pip Williams

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

Reading was such a quiet activity, and the reader in their parlour or leaning against the trunk of a tree 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. I loved that I knew this. That they didn’t.

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