The All-Consuming Fractal

As I was researching the publishing industry earlier today, I dipped my toes into the great frothing sea of imprints. Although I am by no means an expert, I am reading about how in the commercial publishing world, to be crass but almost accurate, basically two or three companies own everything. Their imprints, or sort of subsidiary companies that are part of the great big mother company, each have their own little logos. These logos are often found on the spines of books. And, like brands for other products, once you sensitize yourself to them, it's amazing how ubiquitous they are.

For me, these were invisible until I started actively searching for them to compare who's published by whom. But once I started looking, the bookshelves were dominated by congenial orange and black penguins, stoic Grecian archers, horny roosters, flaming buildings, iconic pond surfaces rippling after a stone has been tossed in, and, of course, the happy-go-lucky leaping "Borzoi."

For the major publishing houses, the organizational structure of the imprints evokes some convoluted family tree of interbreeding European royalty. Or the logic tree for an algorithm with at least three nested loops. With one end result being the appearance of greater publishing house heterogeneity than actually exists, at least from a financial perspective.

With the imprints jumping out at me now like William Gibson's brand-allergic Cayce, only without the vomiting, I am also reminded of the human heraldic impulse that finds corollaries in other branches of the biological kingdom. The marking impulse often is connected with using what you've got that you can afford to leave behind but which is unmistakably yours. Urine, feces, spittle, and pheromones all come to mind as biological markers. For the tool-bearing ape, spray paint, permanent marker, keys, and pocketknives seem to serve a similar purpose. For humans in the publishing and advertising industry, it's the corporate logo. The message content remains the same: "We were here. This is ours. Watch out."

I'm also reminded of the work of my archaeology professor, Katina Lillios, now at the University of Iowa, whose work investigating the possible meaning of Copper Age Portuguese slate plaques pondered the limits of proto-heraldry. A cursory Web search (http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/lillios.shtml) shows me that she has a new book on the subject coming out August 2008, Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, printed by the University of Texas Press—not one of those corporate giants that predominates the commercial publishing industry—and which has also published another book I'm reading, Gary Urton's Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records.

Back to my personal experience, I want to concisely conclude with an imagine-this anecdote.

Imagine it: How every book that exists anywhere is tagged with the story of how it came to be published, how every publishing house evolved its current fluctuating identity, how particular histories and politics commingled to birth physical artifacts of paper and ink, how these connections pervade material and emotional reality, how each moment—like each book—is a jutting-into-the-now infinitely tangled with all past moments necessary for such a state to exist, how books form plateaus of human accessibility across scales of meaning that generate an atemporal narrative—you don't need to know their convoluted and jutting and invisible histories to apprehend their meaning—and how this imagined all-consuming fractal seethes within every experience whether reflected upon or not.