‘Making a book is an extraordinary thing’: Pip Williams on the invisible history of female bookbinders

Pip Williams surrounded by books at her home in South Australia. Her second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, is set in 1914 and tells the story of two women working in the bindery at Oxford University Press. Photograph: Sia Duff/The Guardian

A few years ago in the museum of the Oxford University Press, the author Pip Williams was shown a hypnotic short film made nearly a century earlier which crammed the entire production of an OUP book into 18 minutes. The 1925 film shows a workplace divided by gender. While men were responsible for setting the type, manning the presses and affixing the covers, the labour of women – who comprised around a ninth of the Press’s workforce – was often hidden.

“It’s a black-and-white, silent film, but they’re moving,” Williams explains. She was struck by footage of a woman gathering up long sheets of pages, sometimes 16 pages per side, so they could be folded then bound together.