The Bookbinder – Part 1: Loose Threads

"It's bad," said Eliska.

"I know," said Dana.

"It's very bad. But not hopeless."

The album lay open on the workbench like a patient. The pages had warped from a flood in her mother's cellar, the spine had cracked and a few photographs had stuck together in a blue-grey clump. Dana, thirty-two, a translator with ink-stained fingers of her own, had carried it through the old town in a canvas bag, afraid to put it down.

The workshop was a narrow room under a stone arch, full of paper. Rolls of marbled sheets leaned in corners. Presses stood like small iron dinosaurs. The air smelled of leather, paste and warm wood. Eliska, thirty-six, wore an apron, wire glasses and a pencil behind her ear, and she handled the ruined album with the care of a surgeon.

"How long?"

"Weeks. The pages have to dry slowly. Then I sew the spine again, thread by thread."

"Can I watch?"

Eliska looked up over her glasses. "People usually leave it and come back."

"I'm not people usually."

"No," said Eliska, with the beginning of a smile. "I can see that."

So Dana came back. On Tuesday she brought coffee. On Thursday she brought poppy-seed cake. She sat on a stool by the bench, translating a novel on her laptop, and every so often looked up to watch Eliska's hands, steady and quick, pulling needle and waxed thread through the folds of paper.

"You're staring," said Eliska, in the third week.

"I am. Is that all right?"

Eliska put down her needle. Her ears had gone pink. "It's very distracting."

"Would you like me to stop?"

"No," said Eliska. "That's the problem."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Spine.

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Spine.