If you had to make a logo representing literature, what would it be?

I guess this is where literary symbolism and branding could meet!

I am making a brand for my online English Literature teaching, which is an exciting prospect, but I wanted to do something more unique than a book or a quill — clearly, literature is much more than this.

I’d love to hear your ideas for what a ‘logo’ representing literature could be like.

Are there any metaphors you’ve come across in reading that compares meaning/ literature to something else, which I could potentially use?

1. A nightingale, obviously in reference to Keats but the whole motif including Philomela’s transformation.

2. A very abstract depiction of Orpheus’s head, eyes closed as if singing, perhaps with his lyre, floating on a representation of a wave/ river? (The idea that after being torn apart by the Maenads his head continues to sing, Orpheus/ lyres related to poetry etc). Maybe too macabre unless abstracted a lot.

3. Something with eyes, linking to the idea of insight, but also if possible maybe an eye without an iris, like half the face of an Ancient Greek statue, to represent blindness — evoking blind bards and oracles like that at Delphi, Homer and Milton, blessed with ‘inward sight’ (arguably linked to poetry interpretation at least in the public imagination).

4. Maybe a hand holding a skull (Hamlet), but perhaps too macabre!

5. A bird rising out of a book, representing achievement and ascent, obviously, but also the long literary tradition of presenting the soul like birds

   (makes me think of Marlowe: My soul into the boughs does glide;/ There, like a bird, it sits and sings,/ Then whets and combs its silver wings,/ And, till prepared for longer flight,/ Waves in its plumes the various light.). I like the metaphor of meaning as the soul of a book and its physical form, pages etc, the body.

OBVIOUSLY I am not expecting the observer to figure out all the layers of my chosen logo without explanation, and it’s not like logos need to give a clue as to what the product is: it’s more about creating something visually simple and distinctive.

Thank you!