We are proud to announce that our newly released, ultra-luxury Limited Edition box set for The Folio Society—bringing together Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments—is featured today as the main cover story on Creative Boom.
In an extensive, deep-dive interview with prominent writer Tom May, titled "The Balbusso Twins on revisiting The Handmaid's Tale, and why book illustration is like making a movie," we open the doors of our Milanese home-studio to reveal the rigorous concept, art history research, and raw passion behind this monumental project.
Breaking Boundaries: Book Illustration as Pure Design, Cinema, and Theater
In conventional publishing, illustration is often expected to be purely decorative, reassuring, and "easy, cute, and colorful." We have entirely rejected and transcended this reductive, homogenized view. We bring the conceptual strength and raw power of contemporary fine art directly into the rigor and sacredness of the fine press book.
For us, creating an illustrated book of this magnitude is never about a literal, pedagogical representation of the written page, nor does it ever serve a subordinate or purely descriptive role to the text.
Our goal with this monumental box set for The Folio Society was precisely this: to transform author illustration into a work of art of pure design that blurs and dissolves the boundaries between contemporary fine art, cinema, and theater, offering the collector a truly unique, immersive visual experience.
We do not conceive the book as a static object to be archived and forgotten on a shelf. Instead, it is a three-dimensional, scenographic installation—a piece of "domestic theater" that actively interacts with real, physical space. Much like film directors, we structured a dynamic sequence of cinematic shots, strict costumes, and avant-garde geometries. The accordion-folding opening of the solander box acts as a theatrical curtain or a film strip unfolding across the room, seizing the physical space to elevate it into the realms of pure high-end design and Art with a capital A.
Why This Project Completely Breaks the Traditional Rules of Publishing:
- Visual Autonomy vs. Literary Pedagogy: We refuse the traditional role of the illustration as a mere "handmaid" to literature. Our plates do not visually explain Atwood’s words; instead, they inject an autonomous, parallel visual language into the volume, carrying the exact same intellectual weight as the written text.
- Conceptual Strength vs. The "Cute and Homogenized" Cliché: By introducing the sharp angles and cutting lines of Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, and the psychological unrest of Surrealism, we shatter the cliché of consoling imagery.
- We bring the shocking depth of Fine Art into a traditionally conservative format.
- Three-Dimensional Sculpture vs. Book Staticity: We break the old custom of the book living closed "spine-out" on a crowded shelf. When this monumental clamshell box unfolds, it breaks its own two-dimensional constraints, invading the room and transforming it into a permanent architectural installation.
- A Cinema-Inspired Grammar: We intentionally reject isolated, disconnected frames. We applied a true directorial vision, orchestrating recurring visual motifs, expressionistic lighting, and a heavily restricted, symbolic color palette that symmetrically anchors and mirrors the entire Gilead saga.
👉 Read our full interview feature on Creative Boom here
🎨 The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments Limited Edition is available exclusively through The Folio Society website. The global print run is strictly limited to 750 copies worldwide, each hand-signed by us.
