Layers of Owl

You know that publisher nyrb. They threw a big sale with big, big savings on their "noir" titles, as they designated them: 40% off if you bought four! So one of the ones I got is called THE DAY OF THE OWL. It arrived in today's mail and I wondered whether it "really" had an owl in it, though an owl in the title is good enough for me. Anyway, I idly opened it up and saw an owl in the epigraph! Now, this particular epigraphical owl (I just looked it up in the OED to make sure, and epigraphical is a word, though I don't see evidence that many people have used it since around 1884) was borrowed from Shakespeare's HENRY VI. Now, I could have sworn I found a DIFFERENT owl in HENRY VI, but I poked around on the old "blog" and discovered that the owl of which I was thinking came from RICHARD II. That reminds me, though: I feel that I've been to Square Books a couple of times and wondered if they had a handy mass-market paperback of HENRY V or HENRY IV, but when I looked, all they had was a copy of HENRY VI! The HENRY nobody wants! This is anecdotal and not an accurate reflection of Square Books policy.