Like most good things, and all great albums, Musée begins with a story. In fact it begins with two or three stories, and the real magic is how they weave together...
Having shot a very special wedding in a beautiful location, a photographer wanted an album to do justice to his images. He picked up the phone and called a friend.
Can you make me a very special album, he asked her?
I want something small and jewel-like. I want it to feel precious and intimate, like the memories it contains.
I want it to be of leather. I want it to have that feeling of authority that the family Bible has.
I'd like it if the leather had laughter lines, like an old couch, as if it had absorbed the wisdom and memories and conversations of the people who had sat in it...
Is that possible?
Conversations like that can be very awkward because they can so easily lead nowhere...
How much can you give to other people's dreams? Do you really understand what's in the other person's head? Will they like what evolves in yours?
Can you even get the materials to realise their ideas?
But in this case Heather knew exactly what she would do.
She was already dreaming of a new album.
Strange perhaps that people can dream of albums, but really, no stranger than people who dream of wedding photography.
For years Queensberry had been building a system for designing beautiful custom albums, but now she wanted to do something that took her to a new level, something that took her back to her artisan roots.
She and her design team were already at work on a concept.
In fact the photographer's album sounded like their album ...
She even had the brown vegetable tanned leathers in the studio. She'd bought them for her dream, but she knew they would age to fulfil his.
With a feeling of certainty she made the book and sent it to the photographer, who loved it.
The bride loved it too. She loved the images, of course, but art and paper are her profession, and her husband's, and she adored how they were presented.
Which takes us back to another story…
It begins several years ago with a traveller on a bus in Spain striking up a conversation with the woman sitting next to him. They like each other enough to introduce themselves.
He's a wedding photographer from the far side of the world, in Spain on a scholarship.
She's a paper conservator living in England, home to visit her family in Barcelona - and as it turns out, later, in love.
The photographer and the conservator like each other enough to swap email addresses ... and that's it.
Until one day five years later the photographer gets an email.
Virginia is to marry Richard, her Irish lover, in the Salo de Cent in Barcelona, and she wants him to photograph the event.
Every fibre in the photographer's being wants to do this. The serendipity, the connection, Spain, the opportunity to shoot in a magnificent space.
He and his wife Jo travel to Barcelona, shoot the wedding, and assemble a magical collection of images. Eventually they become that first Musée. You can see Johannes' original design here as a slideshow. It won 2010 Wedding Album Of The Year by a single author at WPPI.
Musée is French for museum, and it's been said that turning the pages of a Queensberry album is like walking through the halls of an art museum.
We like that, especially since our goal was to set a new brand standard with Musée, based on exclusivity and museum conservation quality.
The museum metaphor is especially apt - because although a museum should possess its own serenity and beauty, it really exists for the exhibits, in this case the photography.
And there's another level still: the album and the photography are both means to an end - telling a personal story that we want to enjoy and share forever.
If we forget that, we forget what in the end endows the work with significance and value.
One of our goals with Musée was to redefine Queensberry's "best": to begin a series of Special Editions that stand alongside - and apart from - our standard albums, and take our product to even higher levels in terms of materials, design, artisan skills and exclusivity.
Our standard ranges of albums and books are like a paint box from which photographers choose to paint their masterpieces. There is a huge selection of colours, materials, cover designs and page styles to choose from.
Musée is not a paint box, it's a style. The palette of colours, materials, decorative details is rich but defined, chosen to suit the Musée idea.
With Musée we wanted also a feeling of intimacy ... of unfolding a precious object to get to the precious memories within.
Hence Musée's embossed wrap-around cover of fine vegetable-tanned European leathers, the French ribbon closure and the Solander Box of Pearl Buckram that encloses and protects it all.