We are sometimes asked about the origin of the company name ‘Old Pond’ and its frog logo. It isn’t because we have a pond outside the building, even after all these days of rain.
The name comes from one of the most famous short poems by the Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644-94): Furuike ya kawazu tobimoku mizu no oto.
In his springtime volume of Bashō’s collected haiku, R H Blyth put this into English:
The old pond
A frog jumps in, –
The sound of water!
The late Beat poet Allen Ginsberg had a livelier version: The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!
Our frog logo was devised in 1998 by Liz Whatling, designer of nearly all our layouts and artwork on books and DVDs.
Below is ‘Hoji, Frog’, from Picture-Album by Celebrated Artists, vol 3 (1814) reproduced in David Cobb's book The British Museum Haiku (British Museum Press, 2002).
That’s it, spring is coming.
Sayonara
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