Bound for greatness
When Don Alexander joined George Bayntun’s bindery, he never dreamed it would become his life’s work. He tells BEE BAILEY about binding Shakespeare’s works from the early 1600s, getting his wages in an old mustard tin, and how the old tools still impress
IT was 1977 when Don Alexander became an apprentice bookbinder. Fresh-faced and straight out of school, he’d applied for the job because a friend had told him he’d be good at it. It was the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee, the M5 being officially opened after the last stretch was completed, and British cinemagoers seeing a film called Star Wars for the first time. Even then, going into George Bayntun’s bookshop and bindery in Bath was like stepping back in time.
Don remembers being given the job by Hylton Bayntun-coward – father of the current owner Edward Bayntun-coward – partly on the basis that he lived nearby, even though Hylton noted that the closer someone lived to their workplace, the more likely they were to linger in bed and be late.
On his first day, 16-year-old Don walked through the arched doors of the Manvers Street shop and swung the lever round on the clocking-in machine to punch his ticket on time. He started off at the bindery by being shown how to use pages from The Times to line the boards that cover books, but was so overwhelmed by the whole experience that he was sent home feeling sick before 10 o’clock.
The next day he was back, soaking up 100 years’ worth of experience that had been passed down through the craftsmen, and his path to becoming a bookbinder was set.
“My first day here was very much a quiet event,” he says. “I could hear the clock ticking as I walked in. Then the bell rang for the 8 o’clock start and I was standing left in the middle of the bindery wondering what to do.
“I was a bit in awe of it all because I didn’t know what bookbinding really was. I had no idea in life. I thought it would just be putting paper covers on paperbacks, until I stepped in this old building and saw all the fine leather bindings in the showroom. I was told that they were bound here and I thought, ‘my goodness, I’ll never be able to do that sort of thing’. It was a challenge that was thrown down for me. I took it up.”
Don, now chief restorer and master gilder, remembers the women who did all the stitching working in a different room to the men, everyone being addressed as Mr, Mrs or Miss, and his £12 weekly wage being rolled up and stuffed inside an old mustard tin before it was given to him every Friday.
Although a great deal has changed in the world since Don was an apprentice, much of the good stuff at Bayntun’s remains, from shutting the shop for lunch to still using the same tools and traditional techniques as it did when it first opened in 1894. Every rare book is still restored by hand as it has always been. George Bayntun was not a man who approved of new-fangled machinery, an attitude which kept the skills strong for future generations.
As a lad, Don had his work scrutinised every day until he learned to see his own mistakes and become more accomplished, completing his five-year apprenticeship and another five years at Bayntun’s before heading off to work at two other binderies – Period Bookbinders and Cedric Chivers – for eight years. When he left the latter in 1995, Hylton heard and called to invite him back to the fold.
“I said to my wife, ‘I’ll stay a couple of years’; 20-however-many years later, I’m still here,” he says. “It’s the kind of job that holds on to you. And if you’re going to be any good in the trade, you have to be in it for years.”
The bindery’s world class reputation has drawn royalty, prime ministers, celebrities and ordinary book lovers to its doors, with highly coveted books landing on its workbenches for restoration, some with quite incredible age and history.
Every effort is made to emulate how an antique book was first bound and keep as much of the original material as possible. Newer book covers are dreamed up at the bindery and bound from scratch with lively coloured leather and exquisite gold leaf designs.
Sometimes Don, 60, works on a book alone, sometimes it’s a team effort with everyone in the bindery taking it in turn to do their bit; the sewing and paper restoration, laying the original spine on top of a new one, new leather underneath old leather, filtering a new piece of board on to the old board cover so it can’t be seen, gilding the edges of the pages and restoring the goldwork with Bayntun’s preferred 23½ct leaf, even adding a few scuffs so the book feels like it’s had a life. No detail is overlooked.
I stepped in this old building and saw all the fine leather bindings ... I thought, ‘my goodness, I’ll never be able to do that’. It was a challenge that was thrown down for me. I took it up. Don Alexander
Don’s worked on many thousands of books in his 44 years as a binder, 36 of them at George Bayntun. Some join the 10,000 or so titles for sale on the shelves of the antique cabinets in the bookshop, others are returned to clients who send their books for restoration from all over the world.
He’s seen Bibles from 1611, Jane Austen first editions, old Dickens, classic children’s stories, modern books deemed worthy of a first binding, umpteen Victorian Bibles, and sentimental family books that are worth considerably less than they cost to bind. There are some that have brought him particular pleasure.
“I’ve done quite a few King James Bibles – they’re worth a pretty penny, they go for £90,000-plus, if not a bit more,” he says.
“I’ve worked on the second folio Shakespeares that came out just after the death of William Shakespeare. The first folios were around in Shakespeare’s time, they go for a million. Second folios go for about £100,000.
“I’ve had a couple of cases where
the actors of that period have rolled up the plays and you can see the curve where they’ve been put inside their tunics while they’re learning the words. It’s that sort of thing that makes you go, ‘my gosh, this is real history here’. That is when it becomes an absolute treat.
“With those bindings you see the old binder’s marks. Sometimes the adhesive has started to weaken and the leather covers pop off quite easily and you can see little pencil marks on the boards. You wonder what those guys were thinking when they were binding that book, what was their life like? It’s lovely to be revisiting them.”
Like many binders and book restorers, Don has his own personal mark that he writes in pencil inside some of the books he’s worked on. It’s his first name, written in the shape of the Apollo 11 command module he saw on TV when he was a kid, and tucked somewhere unobtrusive, down inside the spine or underneath the turn on a corner perhaps.
“It’s hidden away but it’s there, so one day when the book comes apart and someone else is doing restoration a few hundred years down the line, they’ll see that little mark,” he says.
“I say this quite often but with bookbinding a lot of my work will go unseen because I’ve done it all inside the binding. When people say they can’t see what you’ve done, I take it as a compliment.”
All of the work is undertaken using 40-or-so different leathers and tools from a vast collection, many of which date back to the 18th century. It is, without any shadow of doubt, the largest collection of bookbinding hand tools in the world, some 25,000 of them. Edward, who took over the family business in 2000 after his father died, and his team take it as a personal mission to use as many of them as they can. “Looking at the tools takes me back to my apprenticeship when I would go through all the boxes and blow the dust off the tools, then I would go back to my bench and carry on,” Don says.
“In my silly younger days I often thought, ‘I could go out and do this on my own’ but the fact that you would not have use of all these beautiful tools is part of what kept me at Bayntun’s, because the selection Ed’s got is unbelievable. “They are always there in case that job comes in that requires that little tool in box 36, or box 46b; it’s waiting to be pulled out and used. When you’re using them, it’s lovely to think of the history and the engineering involved to make them.” The satisfaction for the binders is in a finished job that stirs personal pride. It’s not often they get to see customers react to their work when they collect their book, but every now and then someone calls them out to the shop to say thank you. “People get a bit choked sometimes but they’re thrilled,” Don says. “Sometimes they’re so overwhelmed that they just can’t stop falling over the words telling you how good it looks. It’s better than a pay increase in a way.
“We’ve got a guy in Hampshire that we work for and he just loves them. Most of his library has now got our bindings in it. It’s a great treat when you drop them off; he drools over them. When you know that someone appreciates what you do then it makes you realise why you do it.”
Visit www.georgebayntun. com to buy books or read more about George Bayntun’s history. Call 01225 466000 with enquiries, or visit the shop in Manvers Street, Bath.