The emblem

Four parts

A flame with the letters AE inside it, a column for the handle, and a scroll wound round the column. This is how we read each one.

The flame

In Athens, relay teams raced with lit torches, handing the flame from runner to runner. Lucretius saw the generations in it:

et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt

And like runners, they hand on the torch of life.

Lucretius, De rerum natura II.79

The letters

A and E are the first letters of Aeterna, Latin for eternal. The word comes from aevum, an age or a lifetime. The name suits books that have outlived the age that wrote them.

The column

Under the flame is the head of a column. The curls of the scroll beside it read as volutes, the spirals of an Ionic capital. For us the column stands for order, in building and in thought: each part in proportion, each carrying its share.

The scroll

Before books had pages, they were rolls. Latin called a roll a volumen, from volvere, to roll, and English took the word volume from it. The scroll stands for the Great Books, read slowly, and in the original where we can.

One torch

Put back together, the scroll and the column make the handle, and the flame they hold up is the part we mean to pass on.