Keith Houston's Blog, page 13
December 11, 2016
The 2016 Shady Characters gift guide (sort of)
Given that I’m still on hiatus, I’m cheating a little for this year’s gift guide. I have just the one suggestion, and you may already have guessed what it is: why not treat yourself or a loved one to a copy of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time?
Read more
December 4, 2016
The Metallic Ink of Herculaneum
This post was first published at Wonders & Marvels.
In January 2015, scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, announced that they had deciphered handwritten text from a series of papyrus scrolls excavated at the Roman town of Herculaneum by passing X-rays through the scrolls’ carbonized remains. Then, in March this year, another secret was revealed. Those same scrolls were discovered to have been written with distinctive metallic ink, once thr...
November 6, 2016
A baby and a pause (and a vote?) for Shady Characters
October 10, 2016
Miscellany № 78: catching up
So: time to catch up! Here are a few links to punctuational goings-on from the past couple of months.
First up, pan-European typefoundry Underware recently took some time to dive into the importance of the pointing hand, or manicule (). It’s an old mark, hailing back to the days when the readers of manuscripts and early printed books would draw little pointing hands in the margins to call attention to passages of interest. Though the manicule survived in print, it gradually slid from its pre...
October 3, 2016
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration at the St Bride Foundation, London, on 23rd March, 2017
It’s some way off yet, but I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the St Bride Foundation here in London on the 23rd of March next year. I’ll be talking about the overlapping histories of writing, printing and books, and signing some books of my own afterwards. Tickets are on sale at 12.50 (8).
Read more
September 25, 2016
Miscellany № 77: amperbrand
The ampersand is one of those shady characters that has taken on a life of its own, thriving happily beyond its home in writing and typography. In particular, it exerts an irresistible power over designers, advertisers and others in the business of creating and promoting commercial brands. Fortnum & Mason, for example, recently published a blog post1 explaining “the little-known story of the important symbol sat between our two famous names”. Crate & Barrel, the Ame...
September 19, 2016
The Book publication round-up
The Book has been on sale for a few weeks now and so I thought I’d collect some of the articles published in connection with it, both by me and by others.
First, I posted here a series of articles about some of the aspects of bookmaking that I learned about while researching The Book. Here they are:
Read more
September 4, 2016
Shady Characters at I Love Typography: The Prints and the Pauper
I’ve been a fan of John Boardley’s blog, I Love Typography, since I first started learning about typography and symbols back in 2009. As such, I’m very happy to say that John recently published an extract from The Book at ILT.
Read more
August 28, 2016
Shady Characters at the BBC: The mysterious ancient origins of the book
In the run-up to the US publication of The Book, I was happy to be able to write an article for BBC Culture entitled “The mysterious ancient origins of the book”. It takes a look at the forces, mysterious and otherwise, that lay behind the evolution of the papyrus scroll into the parchment book. It was a challenge to write this one — it compresses a huge amount of history into a few hundred words — but I hope that it does justice to the subject. Have a read!
Read more
