Australian author Pip Williams was researching the history of the Oxford University Press in 2019 when she came across a photo that ignited her curiosity.
She was in the midst of writing her bestselling novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, which has sold more than 260,000 copies in Australia since it was published in 2020 and featured in Reese Witherspoon's Book Club.
The photograph was more than 100 years old and showed a group of women standing among benches piled with paper, in Oxford University Press's bindery, the high-ceilinged room where the women assembled the books by hand: folding pages, gathering sections, and sewing text blocks.
Williams searched the archive for more information about the bindery and the women who worked there – but found very little.
"Archives are amazing resources for writers and historians, but … we have to be aware of what archives don't hold," the author tells ABC Arts.
"Men's fingerprints are all over history … Artefacts of men's work are everywhere, but artefacts of women's lives and women's work … [are] less visible."
Williams did find something: rare footage of the women, known as "bindery girls", at work in 1925.
"[It] showed the women in motion, folding pages and gathering sections into books, and it was really gorgeous and evocative," she says.
Looking at one of these women in particular, Williams wondered if she ever stopped to read the books she had worked so hard to produce.
This thought sparked the idea for her new novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho (published in March), a "companion" novel to The Dictionary of Lost Words that begins as Europe descends into war in 1914.
Identical twins and 'bindery girls'
Williams' latest novel revolves around Sisters Peggy and Maude Jones, "bindery girls" who hail from Jericho, a historically working-class suburb of Oxford.
The two live on the canal in a narrowboat (named Calliope, after one of the Muses from Greek mythology) that they shared with their mother until her death three years earlier.
The boat is crammed with books – some completed volumes and others that are fragments and "seconds" pilfered from the Press – that emit the sweet and earthy scent of "paper decomposing".
Peggy and Maude are identical twins, but possess contrasting temperaments; while Peggy is restive and ambitious, her sister is easygoing and compliant.
"[Peggy] doesn't want the life she's been born into, whereas Maude is perfectly happy with her lot. She loves doing what she does every day … folding those pages," Williams told ABC RN's The Book Show.
Maude communicates by repeating words and phrases she hears others speak, a form of echolalia.
"In those days, Maude might have been described as simple … But she wasn't simple. She was just different. She saw the world differently, she experienced it differently, she interacted with it differently," says Williams.
The author deliberately avoided attaching a label to Maude's condition: "I want people to meet Maude and get to know her on her own terms, without any preconceived ideas of who she might be or how she might be perceived today."
Maude's habit of echoing those around her puts her in the position of de facto truth teller in the novel, through what she chooses to repeat.
"Maude doesn't engage in the same kind of subterfuge of language that the rest of us do," Williams explains.
"Even though she has very little to say on the page, in a way, when she does say something, it's meaningful."
Peggy seems to sometimes see caring for Maude as a burden – but she also uses it as an excuse to avoid pursuing her dreams.
"She would love to go to Oxford University, but she's been told as a bindery girl that her job is to bind the books, not read them," says Williams.
"She takes that on board and uses Maude as one of the reasons why she can't pursue her dream of learning."
A society divided across class lines
The Bookbinder of Jericho overlaps in time and setting with The Dictionary of Lost Words. It also features several of the earlier book's characters, including Tilda Taylor, the bold actress-turned-suffragette; Gareth Owens, who works at the Press; and his love interest, Dictionary's protagonist Esme.
What distinguishes the two novels is class: While Esme is middle class, Peggy is working class.
"In this book, I wanted to focus on the experiences of a working-class woman who had similar aspirations to Esme," Williams tells ABC Arts.
The Bookbinder of Jericho exposes the rigid class lines that serve as a barrier to education, exemplified by Oxford's longstanding and often acrimonious social division of "town and gown", which pits the mostly working-class locals against the privileged scholars who descend on the city during the term.
Somerville, one of Oxford University's founding women's colleges, is across the road from the Press – but, for Peggy and her 'town' workmates, it might as well be in a different country.
"It was important for me to show that as limited as Esme's options were as a middle-class woman, Peggy's options are even more restricted because she's working class and has caring responsibilities," says Williams.
Despite her academic talent, Peggy leaves school at a young age to earn a living at the bindery alongside her mother and sister.
Inevitably, she finds the work monotonous; she longs to read books instead of binding them. Her options to pursue an education are limited, however.
"It's near impossible for a woman like Peggy to go to university, especially Oxford University," says Williams.
The author was drawn to the juxtaposition of a woman who handled academic texts every day in her work and yet was denied the education she so desperately wanted due to her position in society.
The women's suffrage movement is also critiqued — for its neglect of working-class women, who replaced enlisted men in farms and factories during the war.
When Peggy's friend Gwen, a university student from a privileged background (who Peggy meets through volunteering at a hospital for returned soldiers), celebrates the passage of a 1918 bill giving property-owning women over 30 the vote, Peggy is furious that she remains "locked out" of society.
In her anger, she says to Gwen: "[H]ow many of the women who've made bombs and driven buses have property or a degree? They've earned it, all right, but only your lot will get to cast a ballot."
A new perspective on the trauma of war
Williams understood that in setting her novel during World War I, she was entering an already crowded literary space.
"There's no shortage of World War I books or World War II books … but what I found is that most of those books either portray the experience of men in the trenches, or women waiting for someone to come home, or they're about espionage," she told ABC RN's The Book Show.
Williams instead wanted to view the World War I period from the perspective of the women at home, getting on with the business of living.
"They don't have a husband or a son or a brother at the front, they're not waiting anxiously for that telegram, and they are just carrying on with their lives and adapting to this huge upheaval in society," Williams says.
Volunteering for the war effort required financial security, placing these roles out of reach for working-class women like Peggy, who had caring responsibilities or had to work to live.
Wanting to find a way to contribute within her means, Peggy signs up to read and write letters for soldiers convalescing in a hospital nearby.
She forms a close bond with one: Bastiaan, a Belgian officer who suffered extensive injuries in the early stages of the conflict.
Through his experience – and that of Lotte, a traumatised Belgian refugee, and Tilda, who volunteers as a nurse in the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) and travels to France to work in a field hospital – we feel the full weight of the horror of war.
Williams also catalogues the sacrifice made by women with the arrival of the influenza pandemic in 1918.
"When it became obvious that the flu was overwhelming the Red Cross and other health organisations, they recruited women into their ranks to go out and help in their communities," she says.
Tragically, the strain of influenza virus circulating at the time proved particularly deadly to young people – including the many young women who volunteered as nurses.
"A lot of women became ill or … died, but there was no memorial for them, even though they had volunteered just like the men had volunteered for the front," Williams says.
'A fishy, low tide smell'
In The Bookbinder of Jericho, books are sacred objects, prized by Peggy for their transformative power of the knowledge they contain.
Handed a freshly printed volume, Peggy reverently holds it to her nose. She smells "clean leather and the fading scent of ink and glue. I never tired of it. It was the freshly minted smell of a new idea, an old story, a disturbing rhyme."
The Press offered an entirely different sensory experience from the rarefied air of The Dictionary's scriptorium (a desk-filled room where the lexicographers compiled the dictionary).
"It would have been a noisy place to work because of the sound of the presses and the trundle of the trolleys," Williams says.
The bindery, with its oil- and gas-lit lamps, possessed a "fishy, low tide smell", partly due to the glue and glaire (a material applied during gilding) used in the binding process.
Williams is a self-described bibliophile and says she's never read an ebook. She has an extensive book collection at her home in the Adelaide Hills, occupying an "enormous" floor-to-ceiling bookcase built from recycled timber by her partner, Shannon.
"I have so many books; honestly, we could build a house out of the number of books we've got – we could use them like bricks," Williams laughs.
Most are paperbacks, but her collection does feature a handful of treasures housed in a special glass-fronted cabinet: the leatherbound first editions of some of the titles that give their name to The Bookbinder's five sections, including Shakespeare's England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age (1916) and a book of German verse published by OUP.
Missing from the collection – understandably, given its age – is The Anatomy of Melancholy, an encyclopaedic text first published in 1621 by Oxford scholar Robert Burton, which gives its name to the novel's final section.
Williams was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to inspect a 300-year-old version of the book in the Oxford University Press archives. "[They] let me handle it … so I could describe it," she says.
A pandemic hit
Few debut novels are as successful as The Dictionary of Lost Words; however, its publication in March 2020 coincided with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant Williams missed out on the fanfare of a book launch.
This time around, Williams has a full schedule of events and festivals and looks forward to talking to readers to learn firsthand what they think of her book.
She says publishing The Dictionary of Lost Words taught her an important lesson about the nature of writing.
"What I realised is that any book is only three-quarters of the way there when you publish it, and a reader finishes it – and every reader will finish a book differently."
The Bookbinder of Jericho is published by Affirm Press.
Pip Williams appears at Melbourne Writers Festival on May 5 and 6; Brisbane Writers Festival on May 13 and 14; and Sydney Writers Festival on May 26 and 27.
