A COLOPHON IS THE DESIGN OR SYMBOL publishers place on the spines of their books. Glance at your bookshelves, at the bottom edge of each volume, and you might see the Knopf borzoi, the three fish of FSG, the interlocking geometric shapes of Graywolf. They are designed to be clean and distinctive but unobtrusive. The colophon is not what sells the book, after all. The author does. One doesn’t buy A Dance with Dragons because it’s published by Bantam. One buys it because it’s written by George R.R. Martin.
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