This week I took another little step forward in the publishing business: I am now the proprietor of my own independent publishing company! I am happy to introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen, the logo of Second Sentence Press:
The name, as you can probably guess, comes from the quote that inspired the name of my blog, which you can see in the header. But I don’t think I’ve ever related how and when I first discovered this quote and adopted it as my informal motto. You see, I’ve actually never read Laurence Sterne. It all goes back to a morning when I went along with my mom to an appointment at the hairstylist’s. I brought Dickens’ Dombey and Son with me to read in the waiting-room—a library copy, the Oxford Illustrated hardcover. I was just beginning it, and (wonder of wonders, since I typically skip spoiler-rampant introductions) I looked through the introduction first. It opened with some background on when and where Dickens wrote the novel, and mentioned that he was reading Sterne’s Tristam Shandy at the time. And there were a few quotes from Tristam Shandy, and this particular one struck me as very good. I copied it down before I returned the library book, and the rest, as they say, is history. I daresay I don’t live up to the motto half as often as I should, but it’s a good one to strive after. Perhaps having this little logo on all of my books will serve as a reminder.
If I remember correctly, that day in the waiting-room was the very same day that Mom read the first draft of my short story “The Ranch Next Door” for the first time, while waiting for her hair to set. ‘Twas more of a momentous day than I knew.
Oh, and the quote that forms the title of this post also came from Dickens…though a bit more directly! Can you name the novel? (It’s actually phrased after the miniseries adaptation.)