wotwiki
Interview #976: Talking With Tom: A Conversation Between Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, Entry #21
Harriet McDougal
I also loved the ornaments. We worked with Matt Nielsen creating those. They were really good. The emblem that we used for the Blight is a tree, and I was trying to tell him what I needed. I said I wanted Arthur Rackham, and he said: “Who?” I said: “Well, okay, let’s try and work on this.”
Irene Gallo
He couldn’t Google it at that point, either.
Harriet McDougal
No, but he did such a good job. The fans really caught onto them, thinking about their symbolism. “What do these ornaments mean?” They did, in fact, have a bit of a coded meaning. Lanfear’s symbol means Lanfear is lurking in this chapter, even though she’s not named.
It was fun, working on those ornaments. From the beginning, I did most of the chapter titles, all but one or two each book. I was very proud when somebody told me, many years ago, that he saw a chapter titled “Footprints in Air” in the table of contents and that made him buy the book. Well, great, that’s the idea.
Irene Gallo
Every piece of it counts. The whole package.
Tom Doherty
Exactly.
Harriet McDougal
I really wanted to do something we hadn’t followed through with: the Wheel of Time in front and back. Back in the twenties, there was a wonderful children’s book with a bullet hole that ran through the whole book. It was by Johnny Gruelle , who later did Raggedy Ann and Andy. It was a wonderful thing. I would have loved a book that had the Snake Wheel in the front of the book, the big one, and one in the back of the book, so you could really hold them like that to reinforce “There are neither beginnings nor endings—”
Tom Doherty
“—in the Wheel of Time.” Practically, to do that right you would have had to put it on the end papers. We had such nice end papers.
Harriet McDougal
Oh, yeah. Well, the map was more important.
Tom Doherty
Exactly.
Contributing
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.