§ Studio · Three people, one bench, twelve years

A small
workshop, quietly
worked at.

Verso was founded in 2014 in a former lithography workshop on Rua da Boavista in Lisbon. Everything you own with our name on it was made in a single room the size of a large kitchen, by one of three people.

Rua da Boavista, 21438.71° N

The Bindery.

Est. MMXIV · Lisboa

The studio, looking east from the sewing frame toward the paper store.

We opened here because it was the only place in Lisbon we could afford that already had good light. Nothing else about it was suitable. Everything else, we changed.

The building on Rua da Boavista was, until 1974, a small lithographic printworks — a fact we discovered when we peeled back the lino floor and found the offset outlines of two Heidelberg presses stained into the concrete. The presses were long gone, but the room kept the shape of them: two long benches on the north wall, a paper store cut into the west, and a strange half-window that lets in exactly enough north-east light to sew by without lamps until about four in the afternoon.

We took over the lease from a widow who had been trying to get rid of the building for a decade. She left us the Krause guillotine — which had been used as a workbench for the last thirty years and still, somehow, cut true — and a shelf of type in unknown provenance which we still occasionally use for foil-tooling short spines.

There are three of us now: Iona at the forwarding bench, Sébastien in the paper store and at the marbling tray, Ana at the sewing frame. We do not have a manager, an intern, or a receptionist. If you write to us, one of the three of us will write back, usually within a day, always by the end of the week.

A working chronology

Twelve years, roughly told.

2013
The apprenticeship
Iona spends fourteen months at the Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell, London, learning forwarding under Mark Winstanley. Comes home with two broken pairs of trousers and a set of finishing tools.
2014
First bench
The studio opens on Rua da Boavista in a former lithography workshop, retaining most of the original hardware — including a nineteenth-century Krause guillotine that still cuts every text-block we bind.
2017
Sébastien arrives
Sébastien Roux joins from a paper conservation lab in Arles, bringing marbled-endpaper expertise and a working knowledge of every European paper mill still operating.
2019
The Marbled Series
First numbered edition — twelve books, each with a unique ebru cover — sells out in eleven days. We agree to make it again the year after. We have not stopped.
2021
Ana at the sewing frame
Ana Batalha, third and (probably) final member of the studio, joins after two years apprenticing here. Now runs the sewing frame more or less alone.
2024
Ten years, four thousand books
We count. It has been four thousand and change. About a third have been journals, a third notebooks, a third bespoke — the ratio has held remarkably steady.

Founder · Forwarding

Iona Merrick

Trained at the Wyvern Bindery, London. Runs the case-making bench, the finishing press, and, on a good week, most of the correspondence.

Paper · Marbling

Sébastien Roux

Formerly of the paper conservation lab at Musée Réattu, Arles. In charge of every sheet that enters the studio and every marbled endpaper that leaves it.

Sewing · Endbands

Ana Batalha

Started with us as an apprentice in 2019. Runs the sewing frame, the headband loom, and has a better ear than the rest of us for whether the thread is at the right tension.

Come and see the studio.

We open the doors Wednesday through Saturday, 11 to 6. No appointment needed for a look around; commissions are best discussed with an hour set aside and, ideally, a coffee from Comoba next door.