The workshop sits two steps below pavement level on Candlemaker Row, in a vaulted room that once stored tallow. The smell, on a damp morning, is wheat paste cooling in an enamel pot, with a thinner top-note of beeswax and the iron tang of old text-block dust.
Isla MacReady has worked here for twenty-two years. She inherited the bench, the brass nipping press, and a low finishing stove from her teacher, Hamish Lauder, who inherited them in turn from a binder named Crichton who died in 1958.
Her clients are mostly Scottish municipalities. Aberdeenshire sends boxes of poor-relief ledgers. Stirling sends burgh court books. Fife sends the registers of long-shuttered fishing harbours. Each comes wrapped in archival tissue and shame, the spines either crumbled or missing entirely.
The first task, always, is dry cleaning. MacReady uses a soft goat-hair brush and a vinyl eraser cut into wedges. She works one page at a time, lifting silverfish casings and coal soot from the gutters. A single Victorian volume of three hundred leaves takes her a full day.
Then comes pulling. She slits the old sewing with a bone folder honed to the thinness of a fingernail. The threads, often linen, come away in brittle coils. She saves them in a labelled envelope. Conservators, she says, throw nothing away that touched the original.
The text-block is washed in a shallow tray of deionised water buffered with calcium hydroxide. Pages from the 1870s, printed on machine-made wood-pulp paper, tend to bleed a faint tea colour into the bath. MacReady has stopped finding this alarming.
Sizing follows. She brushes a thin gelatine solution onto each leaf with a flat hake brush, then drapes the pages over nylon lines strung beneath the skylight. The shop, on a washing day, looks like a laundry that misplaced its sheets.
“She brushes a thin gelatine solution onto each leaf with a flat hake brush, then drapes the pages over nylon lines strung beneath the skylight.”
Resewing is done on a sewing frame built in 1894. The frame's uprights are walnut, dark from a century of hand oil. MacReady stretches linen cords vertically and works the signatures onto them with a curved needle, using the kettle stitch at head and tail.
The needle she favours is a No. 18 Mellor with a snub eye. She buys them from a supplier in Suffolk who, she suspects, has fewer than ten customers left.
For boards, she uses Dutch grey millboard, dense and slightly waxy, cut on a board shear that requires both hands and a hip. She rounds the spine with a backing hammer whose face is polished to a low mirror.
The leather is goat from a tannery in Northamptonshire that still pit-tans with oak bark. A skin takes fourteen months to become usable. MacReady pares it down on a litho stone with a French paring knife, working from the flesh side until the edges are translucent.
She covers the boards wet, drawing the leather around the spine with a folder, easing the turn-ins, setting the headcaps with a bone point. A single covering takes about ninety minutes if nothing goes wrong. Things go wrong perhaps one time in five.
Tooling is done blind first, then in gold. MacReady warms a brass finishing tool over a small alcohol flame, tests the heat on the back of her wrist, lays down a strip of egg-glair, then the gold leaf, then the tool. The leaf takes only if the temperature, the pressure, and the moisture are correct in the same second.
She does not number her bindings. When asked how many books she has rebound, she shrugs and says probably four thousand, possibly more. She keeps a card index of clients but not of titles.
The municipalities pay by the volume, on a scale agreed in 2009 and not since revised. MacReady raises it informally for unusually rotten work and lowers it informally for anything involving the Highlands.
Her apprentice, a former librarian named Fenella, has been with her for three years. Fenella now does the dry cleaning, the washing, and the resewing. She will not be allowed near the gold tooling, MacReady says, for another two years at least.
A new commission arrived last week from Dumfries: forty-two volumes of nineteenth-century town council minutes, water-damaged in a basement flood. MacReady estimates three years of intermittent work. She has already ordered the goatskin.
Outside, the kirkyard's gravestones lean at their familiar angles. Inside, the wheat paste cools, the press waits, and the brass tools hang in their wooden rack, each one tarnished by a different decade's hand.
