Formed by Murray Browne in 2015, Muted Horn Communications LLC is a small publishing and communications company focusing on books, bookselling and writing. Browne retired from Turner Broadcasting (now WarnerMedia) in the summer of 2019 as the Director of Metadata Services. Muted Horn Communications LLC is registered with the State of Georgia and the State of Georgia Department of Revenue.
Destination: Books
Destination: Books is a local pop-up booth and bookshop that reflects the interests of its proprietor-moderator, Murray Browne, Destination: Books specializes in Organic gardening-sustainability, History, Photography, Travel, Information Sciences (including data visualization), books about books, books about distant lands, and book art. The bookshop's full website is destinationbooks.net. Destination: Books sells monthly at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
Destination: Books also has an online store of mostly used books on the Alibris book site and is a member of the American Booksellers Association. Destination: Books sells new books as part of the Bookshop.org network (an online alternative to Amazon). The virtual storefront is located here.
For the most part Muted Horn Communications does business as (DBA) Destination: Books.
Down and Outbound
Not only is Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, a humorous book about public transportation, but it is a book designed to be read on public transportation. The "11" by "14" and comb binding was designed to be read with one hand while riding on a bus or subway leaving the other hand free for the "o-shit" strap. (Not unlike holding a cell phone, no?) The book also contains artwork and photography.
Muted Horn Communications put together the entire package: from handling the art direction, to the editing, printing and the promotion.
More information about the book can be found at downandoutbound.com and on the Books section of this website.
What is a Muted Horn?
The drawing of the Muted Horn appears in Thomas Pynchon's short 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49 as a symbol of an underground movement that relies on its own clandestine postal service. Since the company's founder is a longtime Pynchon aficionado coupled with Muted Horn's low-key, under the radar kind of business culture we felt we could shoe-horn these meanings together to make it work.
The neon Muted Horn sign comes from a bar in Berlin (another Pynchon worshipper, no doubt) specializing in delicious beers and meaningful discourse (shown here). Pynchon's most famous work is the voluminous Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and was set in post-war Germany, but The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the more accessible (and much shorter) book.
Muted Horn is also the "corporate sponsor" of the Gravity's Rainbow Support Group, a popular website dedicated to the Pynchon tome.