A royal visit to a bookbindery, whose fortunes have been turned around.
June 27 was a momentous day for a small bookbinding factory on an industrial estate on Canvey Island in Essex. Canvey Island is a reclaimed island in the Thames Estuary and seems a gentler, slower world, with its 1950s-style amusement arcades, funfair and cafés. It was an unlikely destination for a visit by a royal family member, but Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, was on her way to declare Charfleet Book Bindery officially open.
Charfleet produces bespoke diaries, notebooks, address books, photo albums and guest books, alongside a range of value branded journals like At A Glance, Dataday and Sherwood. What is less well known is that the bindery also produces Bibles.
The sun shone as I joined staff eagerly gathering around the entrance to await the Duchess, already an appreciative client who regularly commissions leather-bound booklets as gifts. I was one of a coachload of journalists, photographers and influencers, among them the legendary fashion critic Suzy Menkes and celebrity interviewer Chrissy Iley, who’d been shipped in from London to witness the grand opening. We’d already been treated to a slap-up lunch at the gloriously old-fashioned Labworth Café on the beach thanks to the bindery’s owner, Simon Burstein, who now hovered expectantly awaiting the Duchess.
Having ceremoniously snipped the scarlet ribbon across the entrance, the Duchess and her entourage toured the factory, chatting to the craftspeople who showed her how page edges are gilded, how books are robustly stitched together and how ribbons are cut at an angle and then hand-pasted into notebooks.
It was a fitting and joyous celebration because a few years ago the bindery faced bankruptcy. Then along came Burstein, an unlikely saviour and better known for his work in the fashion industry, with his then-wife, Nathalie, the daughter of the designer Sonia Rykiel.
In 2015, Burstein sold Browns, the globally renowned fashion boutique on London’s South Molton Street, to Farfetch, but he’d already secured the exclusive rights to distribute Filofaxes in France, selling them from a dedicated shop on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris. Like me, Burstein is self-confessed stationery fanatic and I went to meet him at his elegant and adjacent lifestyle stores, The Place and Leathersmith, on Connaught Street in London.
Burstein told me that selling Filofaxes became a side business in the late-’80s and ’90s, but he felt so sentimental about them that he kept the Paris shop going. It was only after he split from Nathalie in 2006, and returned to London, that he gave it up. But always tempted by good stationery, he then bought Leathersmith, a company making notebooks and diaries – similar to Smythson but at half the price – and it made sense to buy into the bindery making their products.
The bindery had been family-run for 50 years but had gone to the wall and been snatched up by an American. When the American died, Burstein invested so the original family could buy it back. But the company was going in the wrong direction and within a year Burstein had lost his investment.
He explained what a seasonal business selling diaries is – terrible for cash flow. Diaries are produced in April for September delivery, with payment in December and by the end of January the overstock is dead. Another firm had invested in the company, but turned out to be an asset-stripper that began siphoning off money and selling the bindery’s machinery. Burstein still had shares in the company and was approached by the liquidators. He decided to buy the bindery outright with the cash from the Browns sale. “It was a totally emotional, irrational response,’ he told me. Most of the staff lived locally and some had worked at the bindery for 30 years, so Burstein’s greatest delight was in saving every member of staff’s job.
The bindery began producing more non-date-specific notebooks and landed the contract to make beautiful Bibles for RL Allan & Son to sell in the US. These Bibles are indeed exquisitely crafted keepsakes, handbound in lusciously soft, embossed leather with marbled frontispieces and gilded or painted edges in delectable colours. Now the company is earning cash all year round and Burstein has invested in new premises with state-of-the-art machinery. With Bibles flying out, the ending could not be happier – you could say a small British business saved by the Bible.
Charlotte Metcalf is a writer and film-maker. For more, visit charfleetbookbindery.com
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