Return of the Black Bat

There's one exciting event of publication day I didn't mention. By coincidence, publication day brought a ringing of the doorbell and two boxes of well-wrapped, ultracushioned copies of Shock and Awe from Goldsboro Books. David Headley has been kind enough to send them to me to be signed and sent back. (Don't hesitate to drop through, even if you don't want a signed copy. He'll sell you unsigned copies, too.)

It was gratifying, seeing the books carefully packed, as though they were Faberge eggs, or bottles of nitroglycerin. Between those, and my authors copies, and another dozen I ordered from Macmillan, I'm up to my snoot in Shock and Awe.

(Yes, that is a baby tyrannosaur keeping watch over the flock of books. A cement tyrannosaur, though decoratively painted. Pamela collects unusual eggs, and that one certainly qualifies as unusual. It also weighs an effing ton.)

So, I've been having my own private signing. And, in the course of this I noticed something odd. The Macmillan New Writing logo is an open book viewed from an oblique angle, with the viewer at the lower left-hand corner. In the early days--from Brian Martin's North to Jonathan Drapes' Never Admit to Beige--the book was black. Although a sensible person would have seen it to be a book, my initial reaction was that it was a bat. On closer inspection, though, it seemed to be a male boat-tailed grackle facing right, in threat posture, and with his tail spread wide.

Then suddenly, with Matt Curran's Secret War, the logo turned white, with little outlines to make certain you could tell it was a book. And so it stayed through eight more novels, until Shock and Awe, when suddenly the Black Bat logo returned.

And what does this portend? Is it a message of some sort? Did the Grackle lobby pull strings? Was it unintentional?

You puzzle it out. I'm going back to the living room to join the dinosaur in gloating over the books.