My registered business name was “Scribe Typography.”
I thought of the name about 1982 while I was practicing calligraphy in the sunny enclosed porch of my room in Berkeley, CA. I remember thinking that I intended to be a scribe, not a pen and ink scribe, but a person who made beautiful things with words. My business began with the naive wish that I follow an essentially medieval career model. At the time, typography was a bit like a guild: unionized, requiring expensive equipment, and arcane knowledge.
Eventually I owned my first computer, a Mac II, and used Freehand to draw a red tail hawk feather as the plume for my logo. I had met women who owned their own typography businesses, pre-Mac, or rather pre-Postscript. Instead of being tied to a lease, (see my blog post) I could work at home for about ten thousand dollars (Mac, software, and laser printer).
30+ years later, after being mis-addressed as “Scribe Photography” and “Scribe Topography” too often, and admitting that “typography” is not something people seek out as a service anymore, I opted for shorter, more age-of-internet name for my identity: VJB/Scribe.
After I married, I was no longer VJB, but VBC, so the old name didn’t fit. After retiring, I began doing only work I enjoyed doing; I started publishing special books for free. So VJB/Scribe morphed into Val Books: “Books worth the paper they are printed on.”
You can see that I have a bit of attitude about publishing. The economics for books are so awful that very few books have sales that will support book design, let alone the important contributions of proofreaders, copyeditors, or editors. Naturally authors want to be paid for their work first, but booksellers (with Amazon setting the market) take a big chunk, so there isn’t much left for all the rest of the work that goes into a great book product. Most books can’t even support printing. Ebooks are great! But some of us still love paper books and the printing arts, and that’s where Val Books wants to stay, bringing worthwhile print books into the world.
Val Books 