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

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There are many surprises and amusing facts - such as the large variety of dashes, and how many of these ornate marks are due to scribes being lazy. But the more determined steps she takes to solve the murder, the more she is shadowed by someone who is determined to keep that dark deed, among others, a secret.

If you love the written word (which, I would hope most people on this site do), this was a wonderfully illuminating work that will give you a greater appreciation for what we have today. It's absolutely packed with intriguing, historical facts about all the dots and squiggles that are sprinkled on every written page in the English language. Most of them are printed with a very narrow gutter strip in the middle and then a wide white margin on the outside. Thank you, Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history. My screen is always sprinkled with tiny dots floating in midair between words and pilcrows hanging off of the edges of paragraphs.We go back to the library of Alexandria, graffiti in Rome, medieval scribe annotations, Gutenberg’s obsessive line-justification, the first novels of Richardson and Fielding, Abraham Lincoln, twentieth-century journalism, and the huge influence of Christianity on all aspects of the written word.

Houston covers this selection of such markings in eleven chapters, the last of which resurrects past suggestions for the use of symbols to denote Irony and Sarcasm, but which so far have not been taken up in any big way. However, what adds another layer to the story’s mystery is that even Vera herself is not above suspicion and isn’t eliminated from the suspect pool for a time.TI had never meant to build the Cal Tech itself, and so, years later, when it had solved its production issues, it handed the design to Canon for refinement into a more consumer-friendly device. Lastly, one character tries to save another character in danger, but the help comes too late and someone falls to their death off-page. And in each chapter, Houston pulls together seemingly unrelated threads of history into a fascinating story of the origin of a familiar typographical or punctuation mark.

A series of strange events, however, makes her wonder about the extent to which Henry is in over his head. Scientific calculators were not new, although they were sized for desks rather than pockets (and nor had anyone thought to market them to consumers rather than engineers). For example, Vera mentions Heidegger, an owl, to a rabbit who still shivers with fear involuntarily.

However, as the author Keith Houston discovered in the afterword, this book is really more of an exploration of the development of written language and its stylizing and the evolution of printing.