At some point in high school, I developed a favorite doodle. It was a row of arrows facing in one direction, tightly interfaced with a row of arrows facing in the opposite direction. One set would be colored solid, the other left uncolored (white, if that was the color of the paper). I must have doodled this many dozens, maybe hundreds, of times.
A few days ago, I found out that the paperback cover of Erving Goffman's classic sociology book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life used that motif:
I think this might be the 1959 U.S. edition, but figuring out which cover comes from which year is difficult. Goffman! This takes me back to grad school, but that was in the 1980s and ’90s and there were different editions by then.
I'm entirely sure I never saw this cover before I started drawing arrows back in the mid-1970s in my small town in rural New York.
2 comments:
What it’s (at least sometimes, jokingly) called when someone already had an idea you came up with on your own: anticipatory plagiarism. The book’s designers have committed anticipatory plagiarism.
Well, I think the cover was designed a while before I was in high school, so I'd be the plagiarist. But I know it wasn't intentional.
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