Friday, October 31, 2008

Halloween at the office...


...always a trip. Used to be that everyone felt the license to dress up, even from 9 to 5. Now, not so much. At Bowen Press today we did have a fabulous harlequin in the design department, and a zombie in the production department, so the tradition of misrule has not died out entirely. Soon I will be a proficient enough blogger to have taken photos, but not yet. Just now, though, at home, our trick or treaters included a Mexican vampire (kid who grabbed a sombrero from his parents' hat tree); a superhero, whose powers derived from his "Nike Toe Crusher" shoes -- essentially plastic bags; and a dear young boy who said, "I'm a sorcerer from the Ranger's Apprentice." Okay, it's not a Bowen Press book, but it's pretty great to know that kids still find inspiration in children's books to practice being new versions of themselves on Halloween.

So we finally...


...came up with a logo.
Peter Reynolds was kind enough to draw it for us. It's a "Bowen knot," which when untied is a circle. I didn't even know about the Bowen knot until we started doing research for our imprint. A designer we work with unearthed this heraldic device and now we've made it our own. It's a little imperfect, which I like: it doesn't share the fearful symmetry of the Mac's Command key. Peter rendered the logo a few times for us and named this drawing "small bright." Which is just what it is.
We have a motto, too. Our motto is "Only connect!" stolen from E. M. Forster's Howards End. At our best, we try to connect children to books, authors to artists, ideas to execution, culture to commerce. And now we have a blog, so that's a point of connection, too.