The work absorbed me. Penny and I settled into the easy silence that we often enjoy when we are on our own in the bindery. It’s different when Andy and Leo, our part-timers, are there. They like to play music and talk about the jobs in hand. It’s still comfortable, but different. Less symbiotic.

I measured the available space on the book’s spine with my dividers, then checked it by eye. However carefully and accurately the lettering is placed, if the result looks wrong to the eye then it is wrong. I put the board back on the stand and slipped the foil out of the way. I pressed the handle forward gently to make a blind pull, just an impression of the letters lightly tapped into the cloth that I could rub away if they were misplaced. When I examined the result I saw they were indeed in the wrong position. About a millimetre too high.

I sighed and clicked my tongue, and Penny heard me.

She glanced over her specs at me. ‘Let me do it.’

‘Pen, I want to do it myself.’

I rolled the bar down by what I calculated to be the right amount and did another blind pull. This time it was exactly right.

Even though this was a routine machine-blocking job that I had done many hundreds of times before, I still had to summon up some courage to make the gold pull. If I got it badly wrong there was no chance of a repair. The boards would have to be made and covered all over again, and with the margins Penny and I operate on, and the backlog of work waiting to be done, we can’t afford the time. I took a steadying breath and pressed the operating lever forward. The type kissed the blue cloth and I pressed harder, going in with a smooth bold movement, and the gold tape frazzled as the letters burned out of it. I eased the handle back and bent forward to see the result.

There it was, The Life of in strong, gold, block capitals on the dark-blue cloth. I’d gone in a little too heavy, perhaps, and laid on a touch too much foil, but I could fix that. I stood back in a glow of satisfaction.

However many times I do it, finishing always gives me the most pleasure of all the stages of binding a book. I love the shape and balance of the letters, and the grace and infinite invention that are possible within the conventions of traditional tooling and decoration.

‘Good,’ I said.

Penny finished her rounding and backing job with a final burst of tapping. She took off her glasses and ran her hand through her short hair with the result that it stood up on the top of her head like a grebe’s crest. I knew about grebes from one of Jack’s bird posters. ‘How did it go?’