Bound by Kate Holland using Fair Calf

James by Percival Everett
Doubleday. 2024
240 x 160 x 30mm

Booker Prize Binding 2025

Full fair calfskin, hand dyed with leather dyes, natural pigments, pastels and charcoal, reverse offset sepia printed with an image of water through the trees, underlaid with hand coloured watercolour paper, incised and coloured with acrylic, hand tooled with pigment and metallic foils. Doublures are the same hand dyed fair calf with hand coloured watercolour paper inlays. Endpapers are Griffen Mill Early Wove Cream with manuscript ink, laminated with Tosa Usushi tissue with manuscript pencil. Edges are hand coloured with stencilling the foredge and endbands are hand sewn silk. Custom made clamshell box with suede split lining and sunken onlays of hand coloured watercolour paper.

My main takeaway from reading James was one of anger. Anger for those who suffered so much under slavery and anger for the racism and injustice that still remains in society today. There is so much visceral imagery, whether descriptions of whipping, rape or the sheer brutality of humanity, and my initial thought was to plaster this all over the cover. But this felt disrespectful to those who had suffered. Another huge theme throughout the book is language and that is where I chose to start. Unlike in the original Twain novel, James and the other slaves are intelligent, well read, they speak "standard English" and only revert to "slave English" when the white folk are in earshot. James has a huge respect for books and the written word. He treasures the paper and pencil with which he can 'write' his own history rather than 'relate' it to a white man as had been done in other slave narratives of the time. Though the price that is paid for acquiring said pencil is horrific. I wanted to allude to the underlying current of seething rage running throughout this book and so my first task was to trawl through the text for words which described the lot of enslaved people writing them as they appeared. Here just a snippet written in pencil - Tied. Ripped. Stung. Ripped. Burned. Passed Out. Flowing. Blood. Burning. Wounds. Terrified. Screaming. Crying. Kneeling. Ran. Winced. Rage. Rape. Terrified. Limp. Lifeless. Tore. Scratched. Clawed. But beneath these daily fears are the two words - Hope. Freedom. I chose to write them in ink. I also chose the typeface for the name James within the book and on the outside of the box from an advert for slaves for sale of the time. On the inside of the book it is written in the sloping italic script of the enslaved, on the outside of the box it is an upright script used for the names of freemen. Also the river Mississippi features heavily throughout so I chose a map of the meanders where the Mississippi meets the Ohio River at Cairo to which James is constantly striving as it is where freedom lies. He hopes.

Kate is happy to undertake commissions for design bindings.

For further examples of her work please go to www.katehollandbooks.co.uk and on her Instagram @katehollandbooks.