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Thurn and Taxis is a postal company run by a wealthy family of the same name, which was a dominant monopoly throughout Western and Central Europe from roughly the 16th through 19th centuries. The conflict between Thurn and Taxis and its fictional underground rival, Tristero, plays a central role in The Crying of Lot 49.
Thurn and Taxis Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by Thurn and Taxis or refer to Thurn and Taxis. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,
And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.
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Chapter 4
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“Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”
“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it's a mute.”
She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.
[…]
“Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring—if he saw it—the look on her face. “I've come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There's even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”
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Chapter 6
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It may have been some vision of the continent-wide power structure Hinckart could have taken over, now momentarily weakened and tottering, that inspired Tristero to set up his own system. He seems to have been highly unstable, apt at any time to appear at a public function and begin a speech. His constant theme, disinheritance. The postal monopoly belonged to Ohain by right of conquest, and Ohain belonged to Tristero by right of blood. He styled himself El Desheredado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night. Soon he had added to his iconography the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air (some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian tasso, badger, referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore). He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes.
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Get the entire The Crying of Lot 49 LitChart as a printable PDF.
Thurn and Taxis Term Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the term Thurn and Taxis appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...in disguise at Duke Angelo’s court in Squamuglia. Angelo refuses to use the postal company Thurn and Taxis , which is dominant throughout Europe, because he does not want to reveal that he...
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...to attack Squamuglia. He sends a cryptic letter for Gennaro with the official courier from Thurn and Taxis —who happens to be Niccolò. When Angelo soon learns about Niccolò’s true identity, he starts...
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Chapter 4
...printed with the mysterious W.A.S.T.E. symbol as a watermark. Another stamp, from Germany, says “ Thurn und Taxis .” Cohen explains that Thurn and Taxis was Europe’s dominant mail carrier from 1300 to...
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...span from 1893 to 1954, and he wonders if they might even go back to Thurn and Taxis —even to the 13th century. Oedipa tells him about all the other clues she has...
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Chapter 5
...web of evidence she has assembled around Trystero. She knows it functioned in parallel to Thurn and Taxis , battled Wells, Fargo and the Pony Express, and is still being used to communicate...
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...who is wearing a lapel pin of the Trystero horn symbol. She asks him about Thurn and Taxis and the U.S. Mail service, but he asks her why she is named Arnold Snarb...
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Chapter 6
...looking for in Chapter Eight, in which Dr. Blobb is crossing the mountains in a Thurn and Taxis mail coach and gets attacked by black-clad horsemen on the shores of “the Lake of...
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...1500s, a new government kicked the Baron of Taxis and the nobleman who ran the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly out of their official positions. They replaced the latter with a nobleman named...
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...more information about Tristero, but Bortz speculates about its history. During a weak period for Thurn and Taxis in the mid-1600s, Bortz thinks that Tristero’s leaders would have debated what to do. He...
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...during the French Revolution. Many of Tristero’s patrons despised the Revolution and decided to support Thurn and Taxis because it was an aristocratic institution. After they were outvoted, they abandoned Tristero, whose remaining...
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