About our Name
An “arrow stork” (Pfeilstorch in German), is a remarkable kind of bird: It has flown thousands of miles from winter nesting grounds in Africa to summer quarters in various German towns with an African fowler’s arrow embedded in its body. A couple dozen specimens are known to ornithologists. The modern use of guns in bird hunting instead of bows and arrows has rendered them increasingly rare.
The most significant example, the so called Rostocker Pfielstorch, was caught in 1822 outside the village of Klutz (a real place) in the state of Mecklenberg-Vorpommern in Northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. It was handed over to a local naturalist who recognized the arrow as African in origin. This astonishing discovery instantly solved the mystery of migratory birds that had puzzled people for centuries. Before the Rostocker Pfielstorch, wacky theories abounded to explain the disappearance of birds in winter months. Some thought they hibernated in special hollow trees in deep forests or in holes in the ground; others that they slept beneath the ice in frozen rivers and lakes until the spring thaw—a theory espoused by Aristotle who was wrong about a lot of things. A Harvard professor suggested that they flew to the moon and back again. He illustrated his authoritative 1703 pamphlet on the subject with fanciful images of the lunar surface covered in sleeping birds. The doubly unfortunate Rostocker Pfielstorch, captured alive, was killed, stuffed and donated to the collection of zoological curiosities at the nearby University of Rostock, where it can be seen to this day in a dusty glass case, arrow still sticking through its neck.
We have chosen the Pfielstorch as our namesake and corporate logo because we sympathize with these dauntless birds. In their remarkable flight we see a symbol of the current state of literary endeavors in America today. (Yes, we’re all writers of one sort or another here at Arrowstork Press, and seeing overarching symbols in things is a professional hazard, sort of like dentists who become addicted to laughing gas).
People still read books, though fewer and fewer every year. It sometimes seems to us that 5000 years of literary culture is slowly grinding to a halt, shot through with arrows, as it were, by that monstrous fowler, the Internet, and by ever shortening attention spans, and by cancellation and censorship and silence.
And yet…
Our little Pfielstorch, both lucky and unlucky at once, braves a storm of fowlers arrows, bearing not a baby in a bundle in its beak, but literature itself.
Wounded, it flies on, despite everything.