Shady Characters – The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks

Product Information

It’s the perfect escapist read — I read this when I was ill with COVID and it brought a huge smile to my face while reading. There are almost too many clues indicating Stasia is the killer, leading her to suspect someone is setting Stasia up. The rest of the book follows much the same pattern, with trips through the birth of textual criticism in the Great Library of Alexandria, the lasting influence of Roman weights and measures, the invention of the printing press and the birth of typography, the invention of the novel, the standardization of keyboards and telephone keypads, and the beginnings of the internet.

Between 1975 and 1985, while much of Africa suffered devastating drought conditions, Gambian women farmers succeeded in establishing hundreds of lucrative communal market gardens. My only reservation was that it featured an cast of anthropomorphic animals, a story device that rarely appeals to me. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I was particularly fascinated by the detailed description of the typesetting used by Johannes Gutenberg for his 42 line bible, which was, after all, the 'Star Wars: A New Hope' of books.

It started life as the “Cal Tech”, a prototype calculator designed by Texas Instruments as a means to sell microchips to the average person on the street. The publishers have added to the pleasure by having the text printed in two colours (black for the text, and a kind of ochre for all the typographic and other indicative marks which pop up all throughout the text). Sometimes you just need an entertaining, escapist read to while away the hours, and Juneau Black (the pen name of authors Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel) certainly delivers all the small-town cosy crime vibes, with the animal quirkiness of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox . I found this to be an interesting read and recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the history of language and/or writing. The thing about the HP-35 is this: unlike many other calculators at the time, no part of it was truly without precedent.

A series of strange events, however, makes her wonder about the extent to which Henry is in over his head. It is also nice to see the usage of a pilcrow, asterisk or dagger in practice within the book, especially the pilcrow used in few paragraphs (p. It was never the success that TI had hoped, and yet it gave the company a taste of a calculator market that only promised to grow and grow. Houston’s dry, wry style makes this an engaging read (well, as engaging as a book on punctuation can be).Various marks have been integral in the development of written language, so it’s only logical that some of them were born during important eras for humanity. Most of the samples (reproduced in her book) show poorly "typeset" documents (obviously prepared using the primitive word processing programs of the era by people who had no training in typography). One distance plus another distance is a third, and all three can be read off a pair of logarithmic scales lined up next to each other. But since it’s an account of failed punctuation marks, there’s an unavoidable sameness to each story—someone proposes a new punctuation mark, it fails to get off the ground, and it’s relegated to the dustbin of history. Curt Herzstark, its inventor, thinking it his only way out, designed the Curta to appease his captors — and, after the liberation of the notorious Buchenwald camp in which he was imprisoned, found his way to the tiny principality of Liechtenstein to see his blueprints put into production.