Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Misreading a Logo

I'm currently reading The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. It's excellent, but given the topic and the depth of crap our government was up to for decades, it doesn't make good bed-time reading.

But I did notice one funny thing about it:


The publisher's name is Liveright (a division of Norton). I guess that's how they capitalize it normally, according to their website. Set in all caps as it is within the book, I first read it as "LiverLight" then realized I had mentally added an L, and then read it as LiverIght. That R just wants to join up with the word LIVE to become LIVER, at least in my head.

I also had no idea what the logo graphic above the name was supposed to be. I tended to see the largest white area as a fish jumping, kind of like a salmon or something.

Enlarging it makes it more clear:


Okay, so I guess it's a monk with a quill. But I still see the word "liver" more than I see anything else.

6 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

Boni & Liveright was a major force in modernist literature. There was a Liveright Bookshop in New York, though I don’t if it had a connection to the publisher.

Daughter Number Three said...

So it's just me, eh? Not that I advocate "camel case" names, but wouldn't LiveRight be a better way to render a name like this?

Michael Leddy said...

I’ve always thought it was pronounced liver-right, like Liverpool or liverwurst. But if I were to see Liveright alone for the first time today, I’d wonder how to say it. There’s a YouTube video in which someone says “liver-right.” It goes by very quickly at the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-ivjVkAEoE

Daughter Number Three said...

I didn't catch him saying the word in the video... can you tell me around what minute mark it is? (Fascinating bit of info on The Wasteland, by the way!)

So it actually is pronounced "LIVERight." Huh. That is so odd.

David Steinlicht said...

Letterspacing problem, maybe? Maybe if the "R" had less of a tail. The long stroke on the "R" separates it from the "I" and the two verticals of "E" and "R" connect them.

Daughter Number Three said...

Yes, the R's tail is part of it - and the curving baseline adds to the space between as well.