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A rather niche quiz question
May. 14th, 2025 05:28 pm( Context )
The Atlantic bird is the easy one: there's only one publisher it can be. I recognised the windmill as Heinemann, too. I could picture, but not place, both the urn of flowers and the fountain, but I had to leaf through a number of books before I tracked them down to Jonathan Cape and Collins. Who, though, is represented by the sea-bird? It could, of course, be any one of the Penguin / Allen Lane imprints, and the more I think of it, the more I incline to this conclusion, because surely even by 1950, Puffin books were, as Francis Spufford puts it " the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative". That just leaves the open book. Again, I can picture it, but not place it, and I'll need to use the steps to reach my copies. But this history mentions nothing of the kind, and without using the word 'colophon' describes the adoption of the dolphin and anchor -
- which brings me back to Geoffrey Trease, whose challenge continues:
but modestly does not say that he had recently published a novel in which two intrepid young people seek out a lost manuscript for Aldus to publish.
Book-lovers could have quite a competition, collecting and identifying colophons, and asking each other what publishers were represented by an Antarctic bird, a windmill, an urn of flowers, a fountain, a sea-bird and an open book bearing a Latin phrase.
The Atlantic bird is the easy one: there's only one publisher it can be. I recognised the windmill as Heinemann, too. I could picture, but not place, both the urn of flowers and the fountain, but I had to leaf through a number of books before I tracked them down to Jonathan Cape and Collins. Who, though, is represented by the sea-bird? It could, of course, be any one of the Penguin / Allen Lane imprints, and the more I think of it, the more I incline to this conclusion, because surely even by 1950, Puffin books were, as Francis Spufford puts it " the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative". That just leaves the open book. Again, I can picture it, but not place it, and I'll need to use the steps to reach my copies. But this history mentions nothing of the kind, and without using the word 'colophon' describes the adoption of the dolphin and anchor -
- which brings me back to Geoffrey Trease, whose challenge continues:
This kind of trade-mark is almost as old as printing itself. Aldus Manutius of Venice used a dolphin entwined with an anchor. It was he...
but modestly does not say that he had recently published a novel in which two intrepid young people seek out a lost manuscript for Aldus to publish.
