Spine & Signature started in 2017 in the back room of a terraced house in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Mara Ellison had spent the previous eight years working as a conservator at a regional archive, repairing maps, ledgers, and parish records that nobody else had time for. She liked the quiet of it. She liked that the work required you to slow down and look closely. When the archive's funding was cut in the spring of 2016, she spent a winter thinking about what to do next, and by January 2017 she had a bench, a press, and a small notice in the window of the local art supply shop.
The first year was mostly repairs and the occasional journal commission from people who had seen the notice. The turning point came in the autumn of 2018, when a wedding planner in Cheltenham asked for twelve matching guest books for a series of events she was coordinating. Mara made them all by hand over six weeks, each one slightly different in the way that hand work always is. The planner came back the following spring with another order, and then told two colleagues. That was how the ceremony book side of the business grew, not through advertising, but through one person telling another that the books were worth having.
Mara Ellison trained in book conservation at the London College of Communication before spending eight years as a conservator at the Gloucestershire …