The Journal of Dora Damage(30)

‘Is it cheaper like this?’ I asked.

‘Depends,’ he shrugged. ‘These are beasts, wild beasts, who’ve lived their lives, and all the better for it. Might seem imperfeck to you, but it’s beau’iful to summun else.’

‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a white patch on one of the moroccos, which was otherwise relatively unblemished.

‘We call that a kiss mark,’ the youth said, without relish. ‘It’s where the hides have touched each other in the pits, so the tanning agent couldn’t get there. Just meant someone didn’t rock the frames properly, didn’t do their job. Prob’ly a Paddy.’

‘Will you accept less for it?’ I asked. It was of a lovely quality besides, and I knew I could disguise it somehow.

He thought for a while. ‘A’right.’

I bought just the one skin: a skin of such quality, without a kiss mark, would have cost me two shillings and four pence, but I took it away for just one shilling and sixpence, which I estimated would be sufficient to bind eight crown octavo books.

My journey home was not far, through the fog and the Borough, and as I walked I wondered how much I dared spend on food tonight, or whether it would only be scraps again for supper. I buried my nose in the scroll of leather – it smelt better away from the tannery – and let the magnificent smell of dead beast nourish me. Would that I could have bought its flesh, too. But Diprose’s coins still danced in a pouch beneath my skirts, and I felt something akin to, but not exactly like, hope.





Jack marked round the Bible, and cut out the leather. He snipped the corners and spine spaces off as accurately as a surgeon, laid it on the marble slab, and pared away the dermis, grading it thinly towards the corners and top and bottom of the spine. It must have been hard for Peter, watching Jack’s hands on the knife he would not have been capable of gripping, paring with precision the leather he could only have destroyed.

‘A pea of paste, a pea, no more!’ Peter ordered, as Jack damped the leather on the front and worked the paste into the reverse, then smoothed it firmly but not tightly across the millboards. He folded the leather over around the tops of the boards, and tucked it in around the head-band, using the bone folder, then started to form the head-cap on to the leather, when I had to leave to settle Lucinda for her nap, and collect the water in the pails, before it was turned off again. When I returned, Jack had repeated the whole process with the bottom of the boards and spine, then the sides, and finally the angles of the corners, which met in a perfect mitre. Jack was skilled, but he had learnt from an expert. Then he inserted the boards and books between flannel and tin, and put them into the press.

At least twelve hours had to pass before it was ready for finishing; I needed as many of those hours that Lucinda and the house could spare me, and then I would need to be ready for the finishing, too. Its permanence daunted me: unlike a hearth or a doorstep that could be gone over repeatedly should one miss a mark or a stain, gold-tooling cannot be erased or painted over. The finishing announces excellence and nobility, from the gold itself to the pleasing hand-tools, which, like dainty but solid bits of jewellery, feel satisfying in one’s hand. I heat Peter’s hand-tools on the stove, and my spoons and pans look dirty and ugly by comparison. I whisk up egg white and water to make bookbinder’s glair, and I am an alchemist; I whisk up the remnant egg yolks to make omelettes, sauces, custards, and I am a curmudgeon. Finishing is the way the book presents itself to the world and gets noticed; the forwarding is more like women’s work, for one never notices it unless it has been shoddily done. Twelve hours, and the task, the honour, the responsibility, would be mine.





Chapter Five

I’ll tell my own daddy,

When he comes home,

What little good work

My mammy has done;

She has earned a penny

And spent a groat,

And burnt a hole

In the child’s new coat.





'MOIV BIBLL,’ Jack read over my shoulder. ‘Moive Bibble. Who’s she? The police officer responsible for offences against spines?’

‘No. She’s the Patron Saint of Bad Toolers.’

‘What’s it meant to say?’

‘Holy Bible.’

‘Ah. Never mind, Mrs D. You’ll get there. That’s not half bad for a first try. I’ve seen plenty worse.’

It had not been the easiest of mornings. We had started with a discussion of the brief: ‘a simple representation of God’s bounty in tropical climes’. Peter had no pineapples, no fig-leaves, no palm trees, amongst his tools. The closest he had come to the tropics was binding The Reports for the Year 1856 of the Past and Present State of Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions. I wondered why Diprose had even thought of Damages for this brief. For all his curves, Peter was a rectilinear sort of man; his fillets were the straightest in London. His idea for this would have been a geometrical diaper pattern across the front cover, with a border of straight lines of varying thicknesses.