There’s a symbol, rather ancient-chinese looking, on the spine of Burroughs’ books (at least the early ones): a long vertical slash cut by two short horizontal slashes, small circle down/right. Where did it come from? What does it mean? I have searched, but my google-foo is weak.
I don’t know, but it’s all over the Edgar Rice Burroughs website, and on many products they sell. It’s on the navigation arrows for the website, too. I’ve seen it for years, but don’t know what it represents. It’s not his Bookplate (described on his Wikipedia page), but maybe it’s meant to be a highly stylized version of it?
The top vertical and the first horizontal could be a B and an R. The second horizontal stroke and the long vertical stroke might be an R and a Z, with the circle representing the vowel.
If you click on the symbol and open in a new tab, you’ll see that it is stored in a file called dodajcba.jpg. I did a search on dodajcba, and got a bunch of websites in Polish. The one I bothered to translate was just the same ERB page I started at!
Not an answer, but maybe someone else can run with that…
Its the ERB Doodad. It doesn’t actually mean anything, its just a symbol that Burroughs made up while camping. He and his sons used it as a trail marker so they could tell who had hiked in which direction. The location of the circle indicated either Edgar Rice Burroughs (circle to the right) or one of his sons (circle to the left, or below the doodad). ERB liked it so much, that he kept using it as a personal symbol and eventually used it as a publisher’s imprint on the spine of his books when he started his own publishing company in the 1930’s.
Well the few hits I saw on Polish websites for “dodajcba” are rendered as “dodaj” (imperative form of “to add”) and “CBA.” On a couple websites, it’s being used in the context of “add [user] CBA to your list of contacts” and in another, it’s a message that says “because you are using Adblock, add CBA to your list of exceptions,” CBA apparently being some Polish web hosting service. So no luck there.
You misunderstand. We all know that ERB used that symbol a lot – that’s not what I’m asking about a cite for. I want corroboration of your colorful tale about its origin.
