Pubs and Liters . . .

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Terrance Lindall sent me a link yesterday to this site for a company that publishes art and stories, as well as stories with art, the sort of publisher that interests me these days, for obvious reasons, though I'm not expecting to be published there, rather that I'm trying to familiarize myself with this side of the literary world since I'm usually an impractical sort of fellow, but want to change my waywardly wanton, wandering witless ways into something more wary.

The publisher calls itself "Drawn and Quarterly," which is a clever expression that puns on "drawn and quartered," a medieval manner of painful execution through the torture of being stretched by one's arms and legs and divided by knife into four separate pieces. I wonder why a publisher would want to allude to such a method of execution. Is publishing such a cut-throat business? The wordplay, of course, is upon the drawings that are published and the fact that many literary journals are published quarterly.

I can imagine the diabolical character Mr. Em from my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, as a publisher running a small press known as "Drawn and Quarterly," but I suspect I'd better not write a story using that trademarked name -- though some story about Mr. Em as a pub-lisher of liter-ature would fit such a character as he, given his predilection for dealing with alcohol . . .