Why “Black Riders”?

Author’s Note: This text is from the 2008 iteration of the Black Riders website. It was notable for having a side-scrolling design.

We drew our name from a book entitled Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, written by Jerome McGann and published by Princeton University Press in 1993, which in turn had drawn its title from Stephen Crane's first published book, Black Riders and other lines, whose typographical innovation inspired poet Robert Carlton “Bob” Brown to say of his own optical poem “Eyes on the Half-Shell”:

I like to look at it, merely sit and look at it, take it all in without moving an eye. It gives me more than rhymed poetry. It rhymes in my eyes. Here are Black Riders for me at last galloping across a blank page.

In other words, it's about making your mark, typographically speaking, which seemed fitting for a company with its roots in graphic design.