William Goldsmith

The Bind is a simple tale of an early twentieth century family book binding business, and the creation of the most extravagant, expensive, and beautifully crafted edition of a book ever made. The Bind itself, lives up to its subject matter with gorgeous illustrations in a watercolour palette of browns and greys. From the cover design, to the endpapers, to a centrepiece of elegant fold out pages, this book has been beautifully published and is worth a coffee table space for its aesthetics alone. It even has a bound bookmark as a finishing touch.

The story itself reads like a folk tale; there are two warring brothers, events that follow the rule of three, and a neat little almost-moral at the end. The simplicity of this narrative works wonderfully alongside the captivating artwork, which really does steal the show.

Victor and Guy Egret are running the family bookbinders after the death of their father. The story begins with the spirit of their departed father returning to see how his business is getting along. He tells us a little about the brothers and their very different characteristics, and about how he himself ran the bookbinders before them. He swoops through the various areas of production, administration, and the shop itself, lamenting how much better things were in his day, and making acerbic comments about the staff.

At the beginning of the story, the business is abuzz with the unveiling of a painstakingly crafted, one of a kind edition of 'A Moonless Land'; a jewel encrusted masterpiece intended for the private collection of a wealthy book buyer (who it transpires has little regard for bookbinding as an art form, never so much as opening the books he buys). The plot turns around the scheming of each of the two brothers in relation to this valuable object.

Apart from the artwork, the major draw of this book is in the beautifully presented gateway it provides into the history of bookbinding. The story takes us behind the scenes to where the books are sewn, glued, and finished. We see the skilled craftsmen and women hard at work with all of the many specialist tools they used to produce the final volumes, and gain an appreciation for the craft through the spirit-narrator's ministrations.

The Bind however, is not without its flaws. The story itself, structured on the simple bones of a folk tale, should work very well as just that. But there is a lot more happening in this graphic novel, which at times feels as if it reaches beyond what it needs to do, and in so doing, flounders. The warring brothers trope should have worked well, but it felt a little underdeveloped in trying to be more complex than was necessary. The brothers are very different characters; Victor is artistic and egotistical, where Guy is business-minded and more down to earth, but the scale of the one-upmanship that passes between them seems scarcely grounded in the slightness of the antagonism they display towards each other. Through their minimal interactions with each other, and the titbits provided through the father's narration, we can infer a little about their childhood relationship, and the ongoing tensions between them, but this could have been drawn much more decisively for such a short story. This point links with an overall sense that this graphic novel has tried to do too much with its few pages, and rather than producing something small but perfectly formed, it has gotten a little bit messy in places.

Despite its flaws, this story is enjoyable to read, and there are some beautifully realised moments, such as when the death of a major character is wordlessly explained by the image of two soldiers passing along the street, to much the same effect as the 'Time Passes' section of Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse'. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it for anyone who is interested in the history of the book or book production/design, or who enjoys beautifully constructed graphic novels.

See this review and many more on A Hermit's Progress: https://ahermitsprogress.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/the-bind-by-william-goldsmith/… (altro)

This is a collection of ~20 two-page graphic-format vignettes that are linked through shared characters in the city of Ystov, loosely meaning “Y-town” based on its location at the fork of a river probably in Eastern Europe. The stories are interesting and imaginative; the illustrations sometimes lack clarity and are not really to my taste except in managing to feel whimsical and bleak at once. Being vignettes, it all combines into a sum that’s more than its parts and I'm still ruminating on what it all together meant.… (altro)