An Objectivist Furniture Company?

Costa Brava Partnership III, a Boston based hedge fund, has nominated seven people for the nine-member board of a Bassett, Va.-based furniture company, Bassett Furniture Industries.

Costa Brava owns 5.1% of Bassett's equity, so it can't win a proxy fight without a lot of help. More interesting to me at the moment, Costa Brava is managed by a company called Roark, Rearden & Hamot Capital Management LLC.

That corporate name sounds like a list of three founders. But only one of the three (Seth W. Hamot) is non-fictitious. The rest of the name appears to refer to two characters in Ayn Rand's novels: architect Howard Roark of The Fountainhead, and metallurgist Hank Rearden of Atlas Shrugged.

The novels were very poorly written efforts to illustrate a philosophy that Rand called Objectivism, which itself was just a very poorly thought-through mishmash of what she picked up from secondary and tertiary sources about some of the thoughts of real philosophers.

None of which is to say that the Costa Brava nominees won't know how to run a furniture company. I just hope nobody ends up dynamiting Bassett stores in emulation of a plot devise in The Fountainhead.