Tintin Forums

Okay, I find that entertainment and intellectual stimulation can easily coincide. I need to write more clearly. What I mean is that taking it to the level yamilah does is frustrating. Serious doesn't always mean boring. But to analyse every minute detail takes the fun out of it. Sorry about the comparision to politics and maths. It is my post though, so it is my opinion. You don't have to run with it.

jock123
Actually, having considered how this will go, I can guess that emerald won't be allowed because it wasn't in the original French title, was it?
That's a very good point, jock. I withdraw emerald as a possible colour in Hergé's original titles.

Also, thinking about it, emerald is being used as a noun not an adjective in the title The Castafoire Emerald so couldn't be counted as a colour in that grammatical context anyway. For it to count as a colour, I guess the word "emerald" would have to be used to describe the colour of a noun, ie: Tintin on the Emerald Isle. (Sadly one Hergé never got round to!)

Unfortuately for yamilah's list of four colours, the same is true for the word "gold" in the grammatical context of the title Land of Black Gold. The word "Gold" in this context is being used as a noun (a metaphorical one), whose colour is specifically described by the adjective "Black". So labrador road 26 was right - this is simply a second use of the colour black. For gold to be counted as a colour, the title would have to be something like Tintin and the Sand Dunes of Gold or Tintin and the Golden Fleece. (And I'm assuming yamilah's not counting film-book titles.)

Edit:
Doh! Just realized, that as Richard pointed out several posts back, The Crab with the Golden Claws is a real book title that uses gold (or rather golden) as a colour - somewhat more relevant than my made-up and film-book examples. Not sure how or why my brain missed that! So we can find four legitimate colours - red, blue, black and golden - that are used across the books' titles. I stand by my main point, though, that this isn't really evidence that the number four has special and deliberate significance in the book covers. You could equally well say that the number two is significant - two titles with the word black in them, two with gold/golden, two which mention an animal (crab and unicorn) etc etc. I'm sure any of us could make an equally convincing case for the "special significance" of any number between one and ten - it's just a case of finding the right arbitory category to fit the number you've chosen!

About colours, mentioning 'four occurrences of colours' would seemingly have been better.

About the animals, jock has it right: I meant those with a clearly delineated 'silhouette', or outline, or in "2D".
About the tiny little animal of Cigars, I'll have to check.

But what about the kind of object which is mentioned four times on the covers?

yamilah
About the tiny little animal of Cigars, I'll have to check.
It isn’t tiny, compared to the “snake” on the pot on Prisoners, and the horse’s legs (I think it is a horse) are even more obvious. I looked again last night, and there is also clearly a bird.

Added to that, the guards on the cover of Ottokar appear to have a badge of the Syldavian pelican on their caps, just below the cockade…
…and is there a microscopic unicorn figure-head in Sir Francis’s portrait on the cover of Unicorn…??

yamilah
About the tiny little animal of Cigars, I'll have to check.
That animal painted on the tomb wall that's partly obscured by the title box (a horse I'd guess from its hooves and tail) is not tiny!

yamilah
About colours, mentioning 'four occurrences of colours' would seemingly have been better.
Well, if that's what you mean, the rest of us have collectively now come up with five occurences of colours in the book's titles: The Blue Lotus, Red Rackham's Treasure, The Black Island, Land of Black Gold and The Crab with the Golden Claws.You might argue that golden is a description of the metal rather than a colour, but I'd argue that it's both. If we're going to be that picky about what counts as a colour, most physicists would surely disqualify black. If you take out black, golden and gold, you're only left with red and blue.

yamilah
But what about the kind of object which is mentioned four times on the covers?
Look, when you've deined to address the fact that there are five different spine colours, more than four graven images of animals on the covers, and anywhere between five and two occurences of colours in the books' titles (depending on what you choose to count as a colour), then maybe somebody will be prepared to give some attention to the question you set. Personally, I sometimes feel that by answering one of your cryptic questions, I'm somehow being dragged into supporting one of your nonsensical theories just by getting involved at all.

Balthazar
Hergé used two very distinctly different yellow colours for his spines
I missed this point before, but is there any evidence to suggest that Hergé had anything to do with the choice of colour of the spines? My feeling is that in the early days the colour of the spine tape was probably whatever the printer had in stock, and that by the time the books were re-released in the square binding, he probably wasn’t involved in that either. We really need some proof of his personal involvement.

Is it possible that there is a sequence of some sort to the colours they got depending on when the new editions were bound/released?

jock123
My feeling is that in the early days the colour of the spine tape was probably whatever the printer had in stock.
Hmm... I don't know if there's any evidence about Hergé's involvement in choosing the spine colours, but I wouldn't think it was quite as random as leaving it to the printer, depending on what colour spine tape he had in stock. From my own experience of writing and illustrating children's books and designing my own covers, I'd say that design details of this sort aren't usually left to chance, nor to the printers/bookbinders (not that they use spine tape anymore). It seems more likely to me that the printer/book binder would have been be able to offer a choice (though maybe a choice limited to the four or five colours we see on the books). And, from what we know about Hergé's background in book design (including work for Casterman) and about his general attention to design details, it seems very likely to me that he would have got directly involved in making this choice.

The spine colours seem quite carefully chosen to work well against the colours of the cover illustration, and these same spine colours were retained in the later editions, when spine tape availability would no longer have been a factor - all of which again suggests the hand of Hergé to me.

But I'm only guessing. The one thing I would be pretty sure of is that the number and order of the spine colours isn't intended as a cryptic cipher to lead us to the number four or to anything else. From everything I've read about Hergé's attitude to his work, I'd say that if he did choose the spine colours himself, such choices would have been made for aesthetic reasons, serving the needs of each book design.

Balthazar
these same spine colours were retained in the later editions
Was that truly the case? I thought that several of the books had different coloured tape over the years, depending on the edition, and colours definitely changed when they went from tape to cardboard spines. Aren’t some of the spines different colours across languages as well?
I take on board exactly what you say about the importance of the spines, but still feel given how busy Hergé was, and the availability of so many competent deputies in the studio, that while he might have had passing approval on them, I think a third party will actually have done the choosing.

But as you say, we don’t know, but they will have an aesthetic, not a cryptographic, intent.

jock123
...and colours definitely changed when they went from tape to cardboard spines.
I'm happy to stand corrected. I'd noticed that the few facimile editions I've seen of some of the original tape-bound books had the same colour spines as the modern editions, and had assumed this was the case for all the books. But I shouldn't have assumed that without full knowledge.

Actually I may be the one making the assumptions - on reflection, I now realize that just because the books didn’t keep the same tape colours all the time, doesn’t neccessitate that they never had the colours used in the card-board spines… Perhaps they transitioned to a colour of tape which was matched in the card spine?