I’ve had a lifelong fascination with diverse traditions of symbolism, emblemry, iconography, and heraldry, and the ways in which distinctive and carefully designed visual images can distill and capture the essence of identity, values, and relationships of significance. This, plus my lifelong love of fantasy literature and film, made an interest in heraldry almost inevitable. When I was working on the early stages of my badger book and looking for good images to include, I came across…