A few years ago Angela Voulangas, our friend Sam Markham, and I came across a large antique scrapbook. Inside were hundreds of images—unfamiliar nursery rhymes, animals, strange objects, and elements of moral instruction—each pasted onto pages of linen edged in red silk. They all seemed to be clippings from early nineteenth-century British children’s chapbooks—small pamphlets of rhymes, religious tracts, folklore, or news that were produced cheaply and hawked by journeymen for pennies on the street.



The name "B. de B. Russell" stamped onto the cover of our scrapbook was the only clue to its provenance. That led us to find Blois de Blois Russell, a young man of privilege with a strikingly unusual name. A family member probably composed the album for him around his birth in 1837, near Birmingham, England. B. de B. Russell attended St. John's College, Oxford, and rowed crew. He died early, at 22, and only one of his three siblings managed to live longer than that. That’s all we know about BdeBR but we continue to find inspiration on these pages. We have created a set of alphabet prints using letters and images from the album, designed with a modern sense of scale and contrast. Other products are coming, and we have a name for this line; what else, but "B. de B."