I come from a book family. The kind of family that wouldn't move into a house without sufficient space for bookshelves. Akin to architecture, books defined the shape and flow of the house. And these days, even with e-readers, that is the case.
Well, I was a slightly funny fish. Books, were not my first love. Very much a visual thinker, I loved my pencils, my papers and drawing table. Gradually, I began to develop a visual language that was more discerning than my verbal. My books were art books and sketchbooks. But, physically, they were books.
Flash forward to 2005, I'm a graduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art where I meet this guy, a sculptor, that like me, seems to have a different understanding of books. While I am forever judging a book by it's cover, Tom is forever judging it buy its texture, its spine, its weight.
I went ahead and married him, because like the objects he makes, he seems to give me more dimension. We graduated from the Slade in 2007 and continue to maintain studio practices and exhibitions.
Now, back quickly to the book family of mine. In 2009, Tom and I, along with my writer father got this crazy idea that we might be able to make a book that somehow highlights equally what we each love about books. For my father it was the words, for me the art and for Tom the object itself. This was the birth of Interventions, a small press publication with Down East Books, where we set about rekindling the relationship between fine art and text in book form.
Well, Tom and I caught the bookmaking bug. Tom was fortunate to have learned binding skills at the Slade and my pattern drawings and fabric collection were just begging to become book covers. Enter Broadway House Books.
Our books are made from a fine art perspective. We want them to be unique, but functional. Beautiful in their own right, but still with plenty of space for you to make your own mark on them. We emphasize patterns and textures, because thats what we love. We think about size and weight, because the best thing about a physical book is how it fits in your hand, on your shelf or in your bag.
Many of the covers you see are designed/stitched/sewn by me. Tom does all the binding. He hand-stitches all the pages and uses all PH neutral adhesives to bind the books. He also makes unique stamped prints on the inside of our sketchbooks.
We try to be locally and environmentally conscious. This is a continual process of balancing cost and benefit with our will to do good. We're always researching ways in which local and environmentally sustainable materials can make our books and our binding more unique. Companies like the wind-powered Mohawk Paper and and our local antiques market, where I buy a lot of my fabrics, have been a great starting point.
Each book is a testament to how much we love the look and feel of the physical book.We're so pleased to share our story with you. Thank you for your interest in our journals and sketchbooks.

Cheers,

Kate and Tom

If you want to find out more about our artistic endeavors, please visit:

www.russostudio.com
www.tombutlerstudio.com