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

Product Information

Oh, but the permutations that aggravating mark endured before reaching the form favored by those nuns of my training! 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. Non-English editions Shady Characters is also available in Polish (as Ciemne typki), published by Karakter, and in Chinese complex characters (as 英語符號趣味學), published by Rye Field Publications. Create and Craft Club is our exclusive membership that gives you great benefits including Discount on all products and exclusive member only benefits. This copy received for free courtesy of Goodreads Firstreads program, which in no way influenced this review.

In time, paragraphs were introduced and a punctuation, that I never knew had a name, the pilcrow, appeared. From the pilcrow ¶ to the ampersand, the entire cast of Shady Characters reflects the changes in written communication through the ages, charting how punctuation has adapted to each new technological innovation.Throughout the book, Houston successfully weaves together history, technology, and design in telling the stories of characters that we’ve seen countless times without giving a second thought to. Not only was the writing engaging, but it did a wonderful job integrating the story of these various symbols into the context of the wider world of human affairs. Partway through the chapter, I started to wonder where on earth it was all going, but as all the pieces came together, I realized what I treat I was in for. It was hard for me to put down until I finished it; and even though this is a series, this particular novel’s plot is wrapped up neatly by the end so there are no annoying cliffhangers. In this book written 2013, he mentions the tilde in passing as just one of the failed attempts at a sarcasm mark, which, oh wow what an ~oracle~.

Entertaining history of a variety of punctuation marks and how they developed and became standardised (not just eg the dash and exclamation, but also manicule, pilcrow, interrobang). Although he is careful not to give away classified information, there are plenty of stories that were new to me. Each chapter explains a bit about the mark and then goes through its history from ancient through modern times. There are photos of old texts that use the precursors to what we have now and, for the most part, they are reproduced well enough, but some less successfully than others.In my opinion the Dynamics in Document Design uses very poor examples to "prove" that ragged right is "better" -- but I think the only real conclusion (from Dynamics in Document Design) is that very narrow columns of text might best be set in ragged right, with longer columns (such as in the typical book) are better set fully justified. Here, readers are introduced to the quaint village of Shady Hollow, where creatures from all walks of life – from foxes to moose, raccoons to sheep – live, work, dine, and raise families. By and by, TI worked the kinks out of its manufacturing processes and, eventually, started to make calculators in house.