Bayard was the name of Rinaldo's faithful and intelligent war horse, in the many legends about Charlemagne's paladins.

In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Rinaldo finds Bayard running wild in the forest of Arden. The horse had been enchanted by a spell that kept him wild until he should be tamed by a knight descended from Amadis of Gaul; his hide was impervious to even the keenest sword. But if he were thrown off his feet by the right knight, he would become instantly tame.

Rinaldo wrestled Bayard to the ground and rode him in many battles. They were fiercely loyal to each other. Orlando Furioso basically has three plot variations: a knight is cruelly separated from either his beloved lady, from his sword, or from his horse. Bayard constantly strays off and is captured, enchanted, and imprisoned, as much as the human characters of the story.

He was a bay horse with a white star on his forehead and white rear feet.

Bayard is a French book publishing/distributing company (a S.A., as a matter of fact). It is known by many names:
Bayard France - The HQ, located in France. There are about 1,800 employees working at this division.
Bayard Canada - The whole Canadian division. About 90 employees (I'm one of them).
Bayard USA - About 20 employees, mostly working for Twenty-Third Publications.
Bayard Asia - Quite new, I frankly don't know how many employees work there or in fact, what they do. They'll soon start distributing English teen magazines in Hong Kong.
Bayard Press - Used for the magazines division. 20 or so monthly religion-themed magazines and a dozen aimed at children and teens (not religious).
Bayard Distribution - The new name used now, which includes every single thing ever touched by Bayard since Job had it's first sheep killed for God.

Bayard Distribution, as it is now officialy called, distributes about 40 publishing houses including:
Twenty-Third Publications (USA)
Random House (USA / Canada)
Orbis Books (USA)
Éditions du Méridien (Québec)
MNH Inc. (Québec)
The Columba Bookservice (Ireland)
Eerdmans Publications (USA)
Lion Publishing (UK)
Marston Book Services (UK)
Vox Populi (Québec)
Novalis (Canada)
Templegate Publishers (US)
Oikoumene (Switzerland)
Darton, Longman & Todd (USA)

Bayard Distribution has always focused on fringe markets, like religion, youth and psycho-pop. Anything except pure fiction, though that is slowly changing as the content becomes more and more focused at teens. Through Novalis, based in Montreal, QC, it is distributing the Prions en Église and it's English counterpart: Living With Christ. Yes, you heard right right. These two publications are what we call "missalettes" - that booklet you use at the church to follow the priest/guru/whatever when he does his daily Mass speech. These monthly or weekly subscriptions have hundreds of thousands of followers around the world (not kidding - we're shipping 250-300,000 copies of the French edition only, every month), mainly through local parishes. This market is (as you may guess) slowly but steadily taking a nose dive.

Recently, Bayard entered the Canadian youth market with a catalogue of nearly 1,000 titles for children and a dozen of monthly magazines for children or teenagers - the most famous being Les Débrouillards, Pomme d'api, Owl, Chirp and Chickadee. My opinion is that, seeing that religion in general (being "something-usually-for-the-elderly-people-and-they're-all-dying") is not *the* big trend right now, they're going into teen-focused books, comics and graphic novels. Popular psychology is still high though, with such titles as Growing Through Loss, How To Love Again, Befriending Your Shadow and other stupidly-titled hits. It's not unusual to sell 5,000 copies of a new "hit" in psycho-pop (only in Canada) when a fiction novel averages 100-200 copies.

In June 2004, Bayard Canada bought les Éditions Banjo / Raton Laveur, a publisher from Québec owning nearly 100 titles for children. Lot of good intelligent stuff.

Bay"ard (?), n.

1. [OF. bayard, baiart, bay horse; bai bay + -ard. See Bay, a., and -ard.]

Properly, a bay horse, but often any horse. Commonly in the phrase blind bayard, an old blind horse.

Blind bayard moves the mill. Philips.

2. [Cf. F. bayeur, fr. bayer to gape.]

A stupid, clownish fellow.

[Obs.]

B. Jonson.

 

© Webster 1913.