Keith Houston's Blog
August 22, 2025
A Face with Tears of Joy book launch!
Belatedly, Face with Tears of Joy is having a launch party! I’ll be at Linlithgow’s best bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd, at 6.30pm on Wednesday October 15th for drinks, snacks, chat, and maybe even a reading from the book. The details are here, on Facebook, and you can get your complimentary ticket at the Madding Crowd website.
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August 15, 2025
We have Face with Tears of Joy audio book winners!
Congratulations to Mike Poteet, Red, Claire Little and Barbara Matton, winners of the Face with Tears of Joy audio book giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all entrants who replied to the original post about the competition. Thank you all for taking part!
Read more →August 1, 2025
Win the Face with Tears of Joy audio book!
The Face with Tears of Joy audio book is out now, narrated by Michael Butler Murray, and this is your chance to win one of four free copies at audiobooks.com. To enter, leave a comment on this post with a valid email address so that I can contact you in the event that you win.
Read more →July 26, 2025
Face with Tears of Joy publication round-up
It has been a busy few weeks! Face with Tears of Joy was published back on the 1st of July in the US and on the 17th everywhere else. I’ve been lucky enough to talk and write about the book in a number of different venues, and for the book itself to be reviewed in a variety of places. Here’s a quick round-up of it all.
Read more →July 20, 2025
Logarithmical: Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of emoji
Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law. The idea is quite simple: the frequency at which different words occur in any large body of work, ordered from the most common to the least common, follows a predictable pattern. This is true across languages, and even in some texts, such as that in the Voynich Manuscript, that we haven’t yet deciphered.1
Read more →July 17, 2025
It’s (rest of world) publication day for Face with Tears of Joy!
It’s publication day again! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the UK and other non-US territories.
You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Blackwell’s or Topping & Company. (If you’re ever in Linlithgow, Scotland, drop into my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd — I’ll try to sign a few copies for them.)
Read more →July 8, 2025
We have Face with Tears of Joy winners!
Congratulations to Richard Rutter and Mildred, winners of the Face with Tears of Joy giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all entrants who replied to the original post about the competition. Thank you all for taking part!
Read more →July 1, 2025
It’s US publication day for Face with Tears of Joy!
It’s publication day! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the USA. You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, Powell’s, or Walmart.
Read more →June 20, 2025
Win a copy of Face with Tears of Joy!
It’s almost here! Face with Tears of Joy will be published in the US on the 1st of July and in the UK on the 17th of July. (World Emoji Day, in other words, but I didn’t have to tell you that, did I?)
Read more →June 13, 2025
Miscellany № 109: the terror of the full stop
First: can I interest you in a periodic table of emoji? As I wrote last time, I had a lot of fun putting one together and I hope you’ll get a kick out of it too. If you scroll past the table itself, you’ll find copious details on what it is, how it works, and why I put together.
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