Scholarly Orange
Today I noticed how much more serious-looking Volume 4 of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics seems to me than Volume 3, and especially Volumes 1 and 2.
This has nothing to do with the contents lists. It is entirely due to the fact the colour of the jacket of volume 4 is what I’m henceforth going to call scholarly orange. Slightly dusky, library-ish orange. The colour of the iconic jacket of Naming and Necessity. The colour used to great effect in the cover of (what my cohort used to call) Boolos Boolos and Boolos. A colour that crops up on surprisingly many academic book jackets, in fact. (Have a look at your bookshelf; my money’s on there being a fair bit of scholarly orange there.)
How – my subconscious thought to itself – could any book that colour be anything other than important and influential?
Maybe I should be worried about this epistemic failing of mine. And maybe others share it, in which case I shall begin to regret not having chosen scholarly orange for the cover of my own book.
[...] UPDATE: I am pleased that another philosopher has taken up this idea. [...]
Idea #19: Philosophy Book Design Review Blog « Crusty Philosopher said this on May 28, 2009 at 5:07 pm |
Scholarly orange is good, but nothing is better than Springer Verlag Yellow (aka Logic-Book Yellow)
HUP’s version of N&N is purple and dull. So it’s probably not got the same effect on those who were raised on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
I agree springer verlags “Graduate texts in mathematics” yellow and white are very serious and scholarly looking.
See .e.g.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematical-Logic-Graduate-Texts-Mathematics/dp/0387901701/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246905211&sr=8-1
I wrote a paper about George Boolos and plural quantification which I called “Boolob Boolos and Boolos”. I thought I was being terribly clever, but it seems that it wasn’t as original a joke as I thought…