A Bookbinder on Patience

Ottilie Brannock keeps a kettle, a radio with the volume turned nearly off, and a brass weight the size of a loaf of bread. Everything else in her workshop is either paper, thread, or waiting. I went to Brannock Lane Bindery on a wet Thursday to watch her sew a book, and what I mostly watched was her not touching one.

The long middle

"People think binding is the cutting and the sewing," she told me, threading a needle without looking at it. "That's the bit you can photograph. The job is the hours when you leave it alone."

She sews a book in sections, each one a small folded bundle of pages, stitching them to the one before. It's slow and slightly hypnotic. Then comes the part I hadn't expected: after almost every step she stops. The spine gets glue, then it sits. The cover boards get covered, then they sit under the brass weight. A book that would take her about three hours of hands-on work takes four days to leave the bench.

"If I rush a book it still looks fine on the day," she said. "It's in six months that it tells on me."

What she does while it dries

I asked what fills the gaps. She laughed and held up a paperback with a cracked back, a customer's old favourite.

There's always a repair waiting. She tidies the bench, sharpens something, sweeps up paper dust that has no business being so fine. Mostly, she says, she looks at the next job. She picks it up, turns it over, and puts it back, a kind of slow introduction before any decision gets made.

"A book tells you how it wants to be mended. You only hear it if you're not already holding a knife."

Her apprentice, Kit, who has been there eight months, nodded at this with the expression of someone who's had it said to her a lot, and has started to believe it.

The repair she wouldn't rush

The one I remember is a family Bible she'd been given to fix: loose sections, a spine that had gone to powder. A rushed rebind would have taken a day. She'd already spent two weeks on it when I visited, mostly in conversation with the family, finding out how much of the damage they wanted to be able to see afterwards.

"They didn't want it to look new," she said. "They wanted it to look like it had been looked after. That's a different thing, and you can't get there fast."

Patience isn't calm

I'd assumed that someone who works like this must be serene. She isn't, particularly. She's quick-tempered about bad light and about people who put cups on her bench. What she has is a trained distrust of her own impatience, the way a cook learns to distrust the urge to keep opening the oven.

"I still want to hurry," she said. "Every single time. I've just stopped believing it."

As I left she was lowering the brass weight onto a book I'd watched her finish two hours earlier. The kettle clicked off. The radio, barely audible, was playing someone's slow waltz. It would be Monday before anyone could open that book, and she seemed entirely at peace with that, or at least with her own arrangement for it.