We disguise ourselves as a flower, and the bees will come swarming

“We disguise ourselves as a flower, and the bees will come swarming” is Signor Garamond’s compact account of how to manufacture an audience. Spoken while he is promoting Project Hermes, the maxim turns publishing into a performance of attraction: the press presents itself as a source of occult knowledge, and interested readers are expected to gather around it. The metaphor is both a sales strategy and a revealing image of the boundary between cultural service and calculated market-making.

The Metaphor as a Publishing Strategy

Garamond uses the flower to describe a deliberate act of presentation, not passive discovery. Manutius publicizes a new series on Hermetic subjects, attracts the attention of occult readers, and encourages demand before its books appear. In the metaphor, the publisher is not chasing individual readers; it creates an appealing signal and waits for its audience to respond.

The line also condenses the commercial logic of Project Hermes. Garamond has noticed that readers will buy books about Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOs, including works that promise truths beyond conventional schooling. He presents the new branch both as a promising market and as a cultural duty: he is no philanthropist, he says, yet believes that offering faith or a glimpse beyond the ordinary has value in confused times. The flower’s attraction makes that combination plain. Cultural promise and commercial calculation are not competing explanations; they work together.

How the Audience Is Drawn In

Garamond does not rely on the series announcement alone. He writes under different names to reviews devoted to Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy, asking for information about the proposed series. When their editors call Manutius, he cultivates mystery, saying that the first ten titles cannot yet be revealed even though they are in preparation. This staged secrecy gives the occult press a reason to discuss the project and alerts its readership to its existence.

The promotional leaflet supplies the visual form of the “flower.” It is a simple four-page pamphlet printed on glossy paper. Its proposed series cover places a golden seal, identified by Garamond as the Pentacle of Solomon, on a black ground, with interwoven swastikas that he hastens to distinguish as Asian symbols rather than Nazi ones. Above the space reserved for each title appears the phrase “There are more things in heaven and earth...” The leaflet frames the series as an answer to a desire for deeper truths, invoking knowledge from Egypt, Chaldea, and Tibet in the name of the West’s spiritual rebirth. Design, allusion, and publicity together make the promise legible to the audience the publisher wants to attract.

A Maxim Set Against Manutius’s Business Model

The saying gains a sharper edge from the wider publishing operation around it. Manutius is a vanity press serving self-financing authors, with a staff of four: Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper, and Luciano, a disabled shipping clerk who sends books to authors rather than to booksellers. Its commercial priority is to keep authors loyal; readers are not essential to that business. Project Hermes therefore belongs to a different, reader-facing venture, even as it grows out of the same publisher’s attention to profit and presentation.

The contrast with Garamond’s university editions makes the difference clearer. Those books are generally institutionally supported, academically vetted, and financially predictable: a professor may write a beginner’s preface, the author corrects proofs and checks notes without royalties, and textbook sales cover costs over time. The self-financing author faces the opposite arrangement. Garamond praises a manuscript, forecasts a modest circulation, and invites its aspiring poet to pay toward publication. The standard contract then leaves the author exposed to clauses concerning print runs, costs, and the pulping of unsold copies. Against that system, the flower-and-bees metaphor sounds less like a general principle of publishing than a polished expression of Garamond’s skill at making people approach what he has arranged to sell.

Significance

The maxim is memorable because its sweetness conceals its calculation. A flower appears to offer something freely, while its attraction serves a purpose; likewise, Garamond’s language of spiritual and cultural renewal helps gather an audience for a commercial series. The image does not reduce Project Hermes to advertising alone: the narrative also presents Garamond as claiming a scholarly mission. Instead, it shows how the project’s promise of knowledge and its market appeal become inseparable. The bees may come willingly, but the flower has been placed there for them.