Ever wondered why Knopf’s colophon is a borzoi, or why Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s colophon appears to be a musician riding a flying dolphin? Well, now you can find out. Also, a while back, HTMLGIANT‘s Jimmy Chen ranked some colophons by their ability to fly.
The Why and How of Colophons
Just a Tribute
Imagine that someone wrote fan fiction about you. Now imagine this fan fiction is not just about you, but inspired by selfies you posted on Tumblr. This is what happened to Arabelle Sicardi, who talks with Matthew J.X. Malady about the story she received, her fans and the weirdness of Internet fame.
Boy Geniuses
A snarky take on Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze‘s Wild Things and a positively damning view of Wes Anderson‘s behavior during the filming of his forthcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, all available at Gawker.
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Oscar Wilde Was a Self-Plagiarist, Too
Oscar Wilde’s first and only office job was as the editor of The Woman’s World, a British fashion magazine. Millions contributor Kaya Genç tells the tale, and even explains how Wilde self-plagiarized, too.
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On the Rise and Fall of John Horne Burns
How do you describe the life and times of John Horne Burns? He was in turn a military intelligence officer, a schoolteacher, a critical darling after he published The Gallery, a pariah after he published anything else, and a gay man in post-WWII America. In characteristic concision, Ernest Hemingway summed the whole thing up thusly: “There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school, and then he just blew himself up.”
Balzac in the 21st Century
Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, has said that he drew inspiration from the social-criticism novels of Austen, Dickens, and Balzac. According to the LA Review of Books, the new Gilded Age that Piketty critiques has generated–and will continue to generate–social novels of its own.
New Borges Editions
These new Penguin Classics editions of Jorge Luis Borges’ essays and poetry make a nice set, with the covers of each of the five books displaying a different rendering of Borges’ portrait.
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Queens’ Libraries Speak the Mother Tongue
In many of Queens’ 62 library branches, copies of books are being borrowed are in Korean, Chinese or Spanish. A library branch in Astoria, responding to its own diverse readership, carries children’s books in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Gujarati. Striving to cater to the intensifying globalization of its surrounding streets, the New York neighborhood library speaks your language as never before.
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