The Journal of Dora Damage

I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.

But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.

And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.

It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.