That logo . . .

The "double octagram" design behind the "CP" monogram, which has been used on most Celephaïs Press productions since about 2004, is of course a projection into two dimensions of a four-dimensional hypercube. This specific projection, as far as I am aware, first appeared in the works of Claude Fayette Bragdon, an American architect and theosophist who was influenced by C. H. Hinton (probably in his 1913 work A Primer of Higher Space; it also features in the 1915 Projective Ornament).

The various placenames on our imprint are, with the exception of Leeds, taken from the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the "Dreamlands" cycle which includes the short stories "The Cats of Ulthar," "The Other Gods," "The White Ship," and of course "Celephaïs," and the novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. All these locations belong to a kind of world formed from the dreams of our world's inhabitants, which has achieved some vague kind of ontological stability.

There is a kind of origin myth for CP, originally written in connection with a Call of Cthulhu background.

According to this story, CP began life as Celephaïs University Press, and had offices in the out of town campus of the univeristy (only the nice looking bits of Celephaïs University, based on dreams of the older Oxford and Cambridge colleges and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe are actually allowed within the city limits).

Unfortunately the out of town campus is somewhat less morphically (not to say ontologically) stable than the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, and the press had the misfortune to be allocated rooms in a building formed from dreams of some of the grimmer examples of British educational architecture from the 1960s and 1970s (if you know Leeds University, think "Red Route"; otherwise, "lots of concrete and right angles" just about sums it up). King Kuranes, who has rather strong ideas on the subject of architecture and aesthetics, happened to notice said building while on an official visit to the out of town campus, at which point it was unceremoniously banished to scrubland the other side of the Tanarian Hills, and underwent a complete existence failure a few hours later, taking all the stock, archives, printing presses, type, &c., of Celephaïs University Press with it. The Department of Misapplied Metaphysics and the entire Faculty of Disputed Sciences lost all their offices, laboratories and classrooms the same way.

The University trustees refused to give the press any more rooms or fund their reconstruction, so the staff decamped, and unable to afford office space in Celephaïs itself (despite the name, the only presence in the city beyond the Tanarian Hills is a brass plate and a mailbox in the business district, from which post is collected on an extremely haphazard basis) set up in the small town of Ulthar some way to the west, and started rebuilding. It is not clear just what purposes the offices in Sarkomand and Inquanok serve, especially since the former city is ruined and inhabited by gribbly things who tend to either eat, or sacrifice to disreputable gods, any humans they can get their appendages on. The office in Leeds, Yorkshire, England is ostensibly concerned with bringing works produced by the other offices into mani(n)festation in the waking world but tends to go its own way most of the time.

IRL, the name was probably suggested by Kadath Press of East Morton, a British small press / distro of the 70s and 80s (the name has more recently been used by a Canadian small press).