From blue flamingo to blue crab

As related in my July 23 post "The blue flamingo and the golden stair," I discovered the novel Beyond the Golden Stair by Hannes Bok by searching for blue flamingo. The novel is an expansion of a shorter story called The Blue Flamingo, and it has a blue flamingo on the cover, but the "golden stair" title was also synchronistically relevant. I ended the post by saying "I think Beyond the Golden Stair is my next sync-fairy reading assignment."

Today I finally got around to getting an epub of Beyond the Golden Stair, downloading it from Anna's Archive.

In yesterday's post "I Like Ling," I connected the blue flamingo with the blue crab. I wrote:

Pink flamingos are pink because of the pink crustaceans they eat. Thus, it stands to reason that a blue flamingo would require blue crustaceans. A blue (well, blue-green) crustacean recently appeared in the sync stream . . . .

This was a somewhat dubious link, since pink flamingos eat shrimp, and the bluish crustacean I referred to was a crab. They may both be crustaceans, but they're not really all that similar.

When I opened my new epub of Beyond the Golden Stair, I found that the second "page," after the cover and before the blurbs that precede the title page, was blank except for this:

That threw me for a loop. The publisher is Pan/Ballantine, so I would have expected one of Ballantine's various double-B logos, or Pan playing his pipes, or the unicorn-head logo of Ballantine's adult fantasy line. Why would there be a crab, of all things? Some obscure alternate logo I'd never encountered before?

I ran a Google search for pan books logo crab. This didn't help me solve the mystery, but one of the featured image results certainly caught my eye:

B is for Blue Crab: A Maryland Alphabet. Remember, the crab logo struck me as significant because of its potential link to a blue crab, but my search prompt didn't include anything about the color blue. The fact that a book with that title exists at all is pretty weird. Wouldn't an alphabet book normally be titled A Is for ...?

There's a personal connection here, too, since I lived in Maryland from the ages of eight to 12. I even performed (together with Tim and Patrick, for whom the Alizio characters are named) in a school play adapted from the Chadwick and the Garplegrungen, a children's book in which the main character is a blue crab. (My own role was that of Belly Jeans the flounder.)

I'm still no closer to understanding how that crab logo got there. I checked archive.org's copy of Beyond the Golden Stair and even downloaded a pdf from Anna's, but neither of them have the crab. Perhaps it was added by whoever created and uploaded the epub file? The corresponding page of the Internet Archive version says "Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2024," so I guess this crab is some anonymous pirate's calling card.

Anyway, this is a sign that this book is going to be as synchy as all get-out. I mean, I haven't even got to the title page yet, and I'm already doing sync posts about it!