Pip Williams on the transcendent power of books in 'The Bookbinder of Jericho'

Good Reading Podcast

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of studying at Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Pip Williams about what it was to be a 'bindery girl' at Oxford University Press in the years before World War I, the massive social change the 'Great War' brought for women, and the fascinating characters that have great stories to tell.