Keith Houston's Blog, page 20
October 20, 2014
It’s paperback publication day!
It barely seems a year since the Shady Characters hardback was launched. That’s because it was only a year ago, and yet here we are: the paperback is published today in the USA! Jarrod Taylor designed the excellent new cover; Mark Forsyth, Eric Johnson, Zoran Minderovic, Tim Nau, Jeff Norman, Bill Pollack, Patrick Reagh, Jeff […]
October 19, 2014
Paperback competition: we have a winner!
Or rather, two winners. Congratulations to commenter Lyla and Twitter user @donserifa! Theirs names were picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest.[*] Their copies of the paperback edition of Shady Characters will […]
October 5, 2014
Win a paperback copy of Shady Characters!
Here’s your chance to win a copy of the new, all-singing, all-dancing paperback edition of Shady Characters. I have two copies to give away, and I’ll happily post them to the two winners wherever they are in the world. To enter the competition, just do one of the following: leave a comment on this post, […]
September 24, 2014
It’s National Punctuation Day!
I had an enjoyable chat last night with Katy Steinmetz of Time.com about this yearly festival of punctuation (you can read her article on the subject here), but of arguably even greater importance is that the Shady Characters book is exactly one year old today! Happy birthday to it! (Or to me. How does that […]
August 31, 2014
Pilcrows and poker chips: an interview with Jim Ford
Last month, you may remember, I featured an image of two manicules drawn by Eric Gill for Gill Sans but which never made it into the finished typeface. I lamented the fact that some shady characters just don’t get the love they deserve, citing the fact that Gill’s manicules still don’t exist in Gill Sans, […]
August 18, 2014
Miscellany № 54: Facebook doesn’t get satire. Let’s help it out.
Or rather: Facebook gets irony perfectly well, but its users don’t trust themselves to catch it. Sam Machkovech of tech news site Ars Technica has discovered that certain news stories posted Facebook now come prefixed with the word “[Satire]“, square brackets and all. Machkovech determined that this happens to links in the set of “related […]
August 3, 2014
Miscellany № 53: Dinner ampersand drinks
I don’t mind telling you: I could use a drink. Work on the The Book continues apace — if all goes according to plan, the manuscript will be delivered to Mr Brendan Curry by the end of this year and the book published by the end of the 2015 — and my thoughts are turning […]
July 20, 2014
Miscellany № 52: Eric Gill gets handsy
A visual treat this week! Our header image (above) depicts a pair of manicules as drawn by celebrity pilcrow-user, type designer, and all-round reprehensible human being Mr. Eric Gill. The picture here was taken by Molly Woodward (aka @VernacularType) at a lecture given by Dan Rhatigan of Monotype. There’s little more to say, except look […]
July 6, 2014
Miscellany № 51: a new-old-stock irony mark
A grab-bag of miscellaneous links for you this week; I am knee-deep in nineteenth-century printing history at the moment, courtesy of The Book. Enjoy! After writing about irony marks again recently (specifically, Michele Buchanan’s project to introduce an irony mark along with two other marks of punctuation), I was simultaneously happy and dismayed to come […]
June 22, 2014
Miscellany № 50: interrobangs in space!
I exaggerate for effect. Although thanks to Martin von Wyss, an Australian geographer, cartographer and punctuation enthusiast, we’re on the cusp of interrobangs visible from space even if they aren’t technically in space. I came across a tweet of Martin’s a few weeks ago, and if you take a second to click on that link […]
