The shop is on Picton Street in Bristol's Stokes Croft neighbourhood, between a vegan bakery and a record dealer. The hand-lettered sign above the door reads only Penrose Bindery, in a Roman half-uncial of Eleri Penrose's own design.
She opened the bindery in 2015 after eleven years working for a private conservation firm in London and a further four years teaching bookbinding part-time at the City and Guilds of London Art School. She is forty-six and has bound or rebound, by her own count, somewhere over two thousand books.
On the morning in question, the eighth of June, she is at her bench rebacking an 1879 family Bible that came in from a customer in Wells in February. The Bible is a Cambridge University Press edition, leather over boards, with a marbled fore-edge and a brass clasp that no longer closes.
The book belongs to the customer's late mother and was given to her grandmother as a wedding present in 1902. The flyleaf records four generations of births, marriages, and deaths in a steadily changing hand, ending with a final entry in 2024 for the death of the customer's mother.
The spine is gone. The cover boards are detached. The text block is sound — a credit to Cambridge University Press in the 1870s — and the marbled endpapers are intact, though discoloured. The customer wants the Bible to function as a book again, not as a museum object.
Penrose's policy on family Bibles is to use conservation methods where possible and traditional binding methods where the customer prefers a working book. She has agreed in writing that this Bible will be rebacked in matching brown calf leather and will not be over-restored.
The workshop occupies the back half of the shopfront, with a glass partition between the bindery proper and a small front counter where she takes commissions. The counter has a leather-bound order book and a small brass bell.
Her tools are arranged on a wall rack above the bench: bone folders in a row, a paring knife with a thin steel blade, brass-handled finishing tools for blind tooling, a small finishing stove for heating the tools, a sewing frame for resewing text blocks, and a heavy iron press for finishing.
She begins by removing the old spine fragments and any remaining adhesive from the spine of the text block. The work is done with a small spatula and a barely damp cloth, taking care not to wet the sewing threads, which are still strong after a hundred and forty-six years.
The headbands — the small woven bands at the head and tail of the spine — are intact in the original silk. Penrose decides to retain them. She tells the customer this in writing when she sends her interim photographs of the work.
She has selected a hide of dark brown calf from a tannery in Lancashire that has supplied her since 2017. The hide is a full calf skin and is large enough to do three or four Bibles. She uses the offcuts for small repairs, never wastes a piece larger than a hand's breadth.
She pares the leather to thickness with the paring knife at a stone slab she keeps wet during use. Paring is the slowest part of leather work. The leather has to be thinned from about a millimetre down to a few tenths at the edges so that it sits flat under the cover boards without bulking the joint.
She works at the slab for most of the morning. The shavings of leather come away as fine curls and fall onto a sheet of paper she has spread on the floor. She sweeps them up at the end of the day and saves them — they are useful, in small quantities, for stuffing small headbands on later jobs.
She breaks for lunch at one and walks to a small café on Cheltenham Road for a soup and a bread roll. She eats alone with a book, as a rule, but on this Monday she is reading the customer's mother's funeral programme, which the customer included with the Bible as context.
The afternoon's work is the application of the new leather. The cover boards are reattached with linen thread laced through the original sewing structure, and the new leather is glued over the spine and onto the boards with wheat-starch paste, which is reversible and will not damage the original boards if a future binder needs to undo the work.
The book goes into the iron press at three in the afternoon with brass bands set in the spine to define the false raised bands that match the original 1879 binding pattern. The press is tightened by hand and the book is left for the leather to dry overnight.
On Tuesday she will tool the spine with the original title and the date. The tools are heated on the finishing stove, tested on a scrap of leather for temperature, and pressed into the leather in firm, slow strokes. The gold leaf is applied with egg-glair as the size, which is the traditional method and which gives the deepest impression.
The brass clasp will be repaired separately, by a small workshop in Frome that does ecclesiastical brass and that Penrose has used since 2018. She will deliver the clasp herself when she drives down for a fair at the end of June.
She closes the shop at six. The vegan bakery is closed. The record dealer is sweeping his step. A teenager is sitting on the wall opposite reading a paperback. Penrose locks the door and walks home along Stokes Croft to a flat on St Paul's Road that she has rented since 2016.
The Bible will be ready in two weeks. The customer has not asked when. Penrose will ring her when the work is done and will not promise it any sooner.