Keith Houston's Blog, page 15
June 25, 2016
Edinburgh ♥ Books
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday 16th August, when Gerry Cambridge and I will be talking with Stuart Kelly about printing, typography, shady characters and — of course! — books. As the EIBF programme puts it:
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June 13, 2016
Miscellany № 75: the end of the full stop. Period?
I’m on holiday this week, spending some time in sunny Wisconsin with my wife Leigh’s family, but a minor kerfuffle in the world of punctuation has come to pass that demands comment.
The issue is this: is the full stop on the ropes? That’s the thesis being discussed by newspaper writers in both Europe and America, prompted by remarks made by David Crystal at the recent Hay Festival. As quoted by the Telegraph’s Hannah Furness, Dr Crystal said:
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May 30, 2016
Miscellany № 74: zombies always make a hash of things
You remember the octothorpe, don’t you? This plucky little mark evolved from the Roman abbreviation lb for libra pondo, or pound weight, and into the barred medieval ‘’ before settling into its modern form of ‘#’. Along the way it picked up a cacophony of mostly reasonable nicknames: pound sign; number sign; hash sign; hex; grid; crunch; pig pen; square; tic-tac-toe.1,2 Sometime during the 1960s, however, it acquired another name — ‘octothorpe’ — that is unreasonable by design. The roots of t...
May 23, 2016
Shady Characters at the BBC: Word of Mouth, 24th May
There’s no miscellany post this weekend, but by way of compensation I might point you towards tomorrow’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth programme, to be broadcast at 4pm here in the UK. In it I’ll be talking with the estimable Michael Rosen about punctuation, ancient Greece, medieval manuscripts, Winston Churchill and more — it was great fun to record the episode, and I hope it’ll be fun to listen to as well.
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May 9, 2016
Miscellany № 73: per Churchill et commata
It’s easy to overlook the importance of empty space as a form of punctuation. Certainly, I’m guilty of giving pride of place to visible marks such as the pilcrow (¶) and interrobang (‽). But this isn’t to ignore the groundbreaking invention of the word space in the medieval period; the disappearance of the pilcrow to create the paragraph indent; or, most recently, the use of variable-length spaces as pauses in Patrick Stewart’s 2015 PhD thesis. Also recently, I was encouraged to look again a...
April 24, 2016
Miscellany № 72: sections and shillings
It’s January, 1776. You’re a printer in Delaware, one of thirteen restive American colonies chafing against British rule. The Continental Congress, the colonies’ nascent collective government, has recently passed an act creating its own currency and you’ve been tasked with creating Delaware’s issue of banknotes.1 This is your response:
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April 11, 2016
More on The Book
Publication of The Book is still a few months away (if you haven’t circled August 23 on your calendar with a fat red marker pen, I urge you to do so right now), but I thought it might be nice to take a closer look at the book itself, both inside and out.
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March 27, 2016
№ ⸮ ‽ ℔ ⁊ ⸿ — or, a cavalcade of characters
At the heart of Shady Characters’ recent redesign are the text and display typefaces of Satyr and Faunus, both designed by Sindre Bremnes of Norway’s Monokrom type studio. Shady Characters, of course, is all about unusual marks of punctuation, and I was glad to see that both typefaces came complete with a handy selection of special characters. Even so, there were a few marks missing: the interrobang for one; the numero symbol I use in many post titles for another. As I chatted...
March 13, 2016
Miscellany № 71 — ‘⋮’ redux
Last time round, inspired by Marcin Wichary’s tweet, I wrote a short post about the curious case of the character ‘’, which was present on some of the earliest typewriter keyboards but that mysteriously disappeared from later machines. The comments came in thick and fast, and reader Thomas A. Fine was moved to carry out his own investigation into the life and death of the elusive vertical ellipsis.
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Miscellany 71 — ‘⋮’ redux
Last time round, inspired by Marcin Wichary’s tweet, I wrote a short post about the curious case of the character ‘’, which was present on some of the earliest typewriter keyboards but that mysteriously disappeared from later machines. The comments came in thick and fast, and reader Thomas A. Fine was moved to carry out his own investigation into the life and death of the elusive vertical ellipsis.
Read more
