Borzoi Books is the publishing imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., the American publishing house founded in 1915 by Alfred A. Knopf and Blanche Wolf Knopf. The imprint takes its name from the borzoi, or Russian wolfhound, which has served as the publisher’s trademark colophon since the company’s earliest years. Today, Alfred A. Knopf operates as an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.[1]
Design and History
The borzoi was adopted as Knopf’s mark at the suggestion of co-founder Blanche Knopf, who was fond of the breed’s appearance and proposed that a drawing of one be used as a colophon.[2] Alfred Knopf explained the choice in a 1948 statement: “The coursing Borzoi has always been our trademark.” He noted that the publisher he most admired, London’s William Heinemann, used a windmill as its sign, and since “a windmill obviously had nothing to do with books,” he saw no reason why Knopf could not adopt the borzoi as its mark.[3]
In 1945, graphic designer Paul Rand created a new version of the borzoi mark for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Rand’s borzoi design is documented among his classic trademarks, listed as “Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1945” in his 1960 book The Trademarks of Paul Rand.[4] Rand, who designed book covers for Alfred A. Knopf early in his career, applied his characteristic modernist approach to the redesign of the publisher’s trademark.[5]
Over the years, the borzoi colophon has appeared in numerous variations. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas holds nearly 150 recorded borzoi designs, most of which were created by the publisher or by contract designers rather than by authors.[6] One notable exception was author Kahlil Gibran, who designed his own borzoi colophon for his Knopf publications beginning with Twenty Drawings (1919).[6]
The borzoi mark remains central to Knopf’s identity today. According to the publisher, the logo appears on every title page and casing of every book it publishes, just as it did in Alfred Knopf’s day.[3] Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.[7]
Meaning and Symbolism
The borzoi was chosen not for any symbolic connection to literature but as a distinctive identifying mark. Alfred Knopf explicitly rejected the notion that a publisher’s sign needed to relate to books, pointing to Heinemann’s windmill as a precedent for an arbitrary emblem.[3] Blanche Knopf’s personal fondness for the borzoi breed, a Russian sighthound, drove the selection.[2]
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