The names
Rudbek & Associates, the great trading house in Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy — the inheritance Thorby returns to reclaim and govern honestly. An old-merchant-bank sound with a good-governance story.
Ben Caxton, the journalist in Stranger in a Strange Land— and the name of England’s first printer. Records, publishing, getting the story right in print.
Both drawn in the same flat, warm geometry — terracotta, sage, charcoal, lowercase wordmark — so the choice is about the name and the mark, not the styling.
The scheme
Lowercase, rounded-terminal geometric sans. Final art sets this in a proper face — Nunito or Quicksand class. Mid-century flat shapes, no gradients, no rounded-tech gloss.
Rudbek A · Ledger R
The monogram: an R in stencil slats, with the leg kicked out in terracotta and a sage ledger tick at its foot. Merchant-house solidity with the books right there in the letterform.
Rudbek B · The House
The mark the name asks for: a flat merchant house — keep, warehouse, and roofline in one — with sage and terracotta ledger lines shelved inside. The most literal read of 'a great trading house'.
Caxton A · Slat C
The monogram: a C built from three press-slat bars, a terracotta registration mark sitting in its open side — the printer's nod. Clean, architectural, closest to the scheme's grid.
Caxton B · The Nib
The journalist's mark: a flat pen nib — charcoal body, terracotta breather, sage baseline rule under the point. The most editorial of the set; records and reporting made literal.
The Heinlein cut · Astrogation Plate — selected · rudbek
How would Heinlein have drawn it? He was an engineer before he was a writer — Annapolis, aeronautics, a man who put orbital-mechanics diagrams in his novels and designed his own house down to the door hardware. His mark would be a drawing, not a swoosh: a blueprint plate, registration marks and title block included. Two parking orbits and the transfer ellipse between them — the Hohmann path, where the efficient route is the patient one. You burn once, you coast, you arrive. The terracotta dot is where you mean to be. Lettering set like a drawing’s title block, because that is how an engineer signs his work.