Hazel Reid

Her grandmother taught her to bind books in an Old Town workshop that smelled of paste and leather, and when the old woman died three years ago, she left Hazel a bindery one month from closing. Hazel worked sixteen-hour days, sleeping on the workshop floor, until she became the restorer every rare book dealer in Britain calls. Now she spends her days bringing four-hundred-year-old books back to life with thread and gold leaf, and her nights alone in a flat with slanted ceilings and towers of books on every surface. She collects the most heartbreaking things strangers wrote in old margins, because nobody has ever written anything like that to her, and she is certain that kind of tenderness only exists on paper.