The Bodkin

Before a single thread could be sewn through the gathered pages, the holes had to be made, and for that Nyra kept a bodkin, a short steel point seated in a round handle of worn pear wood. She stood the folded signatures on end along a cradle and marked the stations with a pencil, small even dots down the fold, and then she drove the point through at each mark so that the needle would later pass without tearing the paper.

The apprentice thought at first that any sharp thing would serve, a pin or a spare nail, but Nyra showed how the bodkin was shaped for this task and no other. The point was long enough to pass clean through a thick gathering and no longer, the shoulder blunt enough to stop the hole from widening past the size the thread would need. A tool that does one task and does it well, she said, is worth more than ten that half do many.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The holes the bodkin makes are part of the rest. No reader counts them, and no ledger records the care of their spacing, yet every page turns on them, held to the next by a thread that found a way through a passage opened in advance by a steady hand.

Nyra worked slowly, testing the point against her thumb before each row, keeping the holes in a true line down the fold. A station set crooked, she warned, would pull the whole book out of square, the pages drifting one against another until the fore edge ran uneven. Better to pierce with patience, to measure twice and press once, so that the sewing to come would lie flat and the spine would gather round and firm.

So the apprentice learned that the quiet beginning of a bound book is a row of small openings, made before any thread is drawn, each one an act of faith that the sewing will follow. What the bodkin gives is never seen in the finished volume. It is only the path made ready, the way prepared, the hard page taught to let the thread through. The book keeps the passage, and you keep the piercing of it.