Table Talk

THE HOUSE I grew up in was full of books, even though hardly anyone in the house read books. My father was a teacher in a state school, and my mother had a full-time job bringing up their six children. To supplement my father’s meager salary, my parents would spend their evenings binding books.

This was a time when people bought books in separate installments, or fascicles, at the village store, and when they had the complete set, they would return them so that they could be made into books. Each Friday, my father would collect these fascicles in his Renault 4 and take them home to be worked on during the week, at the same time delivering the books that he and my mother had bound the previous week. I can still remember the cold, rickety workshop my father had built in the backyard. I can smell the paste used to attach the endpapers, the thin carpenter’s glue, the sheets of fake leather for lining the boards, the gold leaf with which they decorated the spines. I remember my mother sitting at the sewing frame—also home-made. She would stretch inch-wide strips of cloth between the upper part of the frame and its base, then stitch the fascicles onto the cloth. The nylon thread she used became, for us, a byword for toughness. It was impossible to break, and when she sewed, she had to wear leather protectors. Finger cots, they were called, and, again, these were home-made.

When my