Shakespeare Recovered and Binding the Bard were two separate exhibitions running alongside each other at Palace Green Library, Durham University. Both were built around the same book, Durham’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, though each told a very different part of its story.

Shakespeare Recovered told the story of the Folio itself: its theft, its damage, and the conservation work to understand and care for it. Binding the Bard, shown in its own room alongside the actual entries to an international bookbinding competition, told the story of one bookbinder’s craft. Working across both over the course of a year is what this piece is about.

Shakespeare Recovered and Binding the Bard: Three Films, Three Rooms

Visitors moved through the space in a particular order. In the entrance to Cosin’s Library, a short introductory film gave people the Folio’s journey before they reached the book itself. That film isn’t published here yet. Once through into Cosin’s Library, where the Folio was on display in its current, unbound state, the conservation film played on a loop, giving context on the analysis and the care Durham’s team have put into understanding it. Binding the Bard sat in a separate room entirely, where Dominic Riley’s film played alongside the real bindings submitted to the competition, so visitors could watch him at work and then see what came of it in the same space.

Two Days With Dominic

The studio days with Dominic Riley were the kind of filming I find hardest to leave. We spent both days working through every stage of a binding, Dominic talking as he worked, and I was mostly there to let him keep talking, to give him the room to get into the anecdotes and the reasoning behind decisions that don’t usually get explained out loud. There’s a particular feeling at the end of a shoot like that, packing the cameras away and realising how much someone has just shared with you, and how strange it is to think you might never see them again.

With Dominic, that wasn’t quite how it went. I saw him again at the opening, once the winning binding had been announced at Palace Green Library, and catching sight of him across the room felt oddly like running into someone I’d known for years, not someone I’d spent two days with weeks before. I put a lot of effort into building a genuine working relationship with the people I film, even when we only have a few hours together, and Dominic’s generosity with his time and his thinking in the studio made that connection particularly strong. It’s one of the better outcomes a project like this can have, when a relationship built through making a film carries on after the filming itself is finished.

The Connecting Thread

Two separate exhibitions, three films, and it could easily have felt like unrelated projects that happened to share a book. What kept them connected, for me, was Lauren Moon-Schott. She’s one of the central voices in the Shakespeare Recovered conservation film, along with Tony King, and she was also there when we filmed Dominic for Binding the Bard, bringing the same expertise and evident love of books to both projects. Her understanding of how books are physically made and how they come apart over centuries gave me a much better grasp of what I was actually filming in Dominic’s studio, and it worked the other way too, watching a working bindery first made the conservation team’s own reasoning easier to follow when we came to film that side of the story.

That’s the closest I got to seeing the two threads as versions of each other. A binder’s hands and a conservator’s instruments do very different work, but both come from the same refusal to guess when you can actually look closely.

A Year in Two Parts

The wider project behind Shakespeare Recovered and Binding the Bard ran across a full year, and several sections of the Shakespeare Recovered material were already filmed by the time we got to Dominic’s studio. The second half of his story, the judging of the international bookbinding competition, happened later still, back at Palace Green Library, once entries had arrived from across the world.

Working this way, returning to different strands of a project over many months rather than filming everything in one block, often means something from a later shoot gives new meaning to footage captured months earlier. Lauren was very much the person who made that possible here. It’s the part of working as a filmmaker at Durham University I enjoy most: coming back to the same people and places again and again, rather than trying to capture everything in one visit.

Both exhibitions sit alongside my wider work as Filmmaker and Podcaster in Residence at Durham University.

Shakespeare Recovered and Binding the Bard stand as two separate exhibitions and, eventually, three separate films, because the craft and the science each deserved their own space and their own room. But they grew out of the same year and the same book, and in the end, the same kind of close attention to something old and particular.