Keith Houston's Blog, page 22

Mea culpa

Like many books, a few errors slipped through the net as I wrote Shady Characters and evaded even the practised gaze of Brendan Curry, my editor at W. W. Norton, and of Rachelle Mandik, our excellent copy-editor. Unlike some books, however, I’ve been lucky enough to have a cadre of eagle-eyed readers to pick up […]

Calling all book groups

Last Friday, quite unexpectedly, I found myself chatting to a book group in NYC. Kristina Jelinek had mentioned on Twitter that she was reading Shady Characters for her book group at work; I offered to join in too, if they’d like to have me, and so I spent an absorbing forty-five minutes answering questions over […]

Miscellany № 42: ¡gnaborretni?

Happy new year! Are you ready for a hair of the dog? Earlier this month, Dr Jesús Rogel-Salazar, a physicist with interests in quantum mechanics, ultra cold matter, nonlinear optics, computational physics — and punctuation, as it turns out — got in touch on Twitter to ask: Any idea if inverted interrobangs are/were in use, […]

Miscellany № 41: a cornucopia for Christmas

Time for one last grab-bag of punctuation goodies before Christmas and New Year. First comes a story courtesy of the American TV quiz show Jeopardy (yes, I’m as surprised as you are). The basic idea behind Jeopardy, for the uninitiated (as I was, until my wife made me watch Saturday Night Live’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches), […]

An author asks: what is the ‘§’ called?

First, thank you to everyone who came along to the Waterstones Christmas Cracker on Thursday! It was great to so many familiar faces there, and to meet some new ones too. James Robertson, who read from his new novel The Professor of Truth, asked me a question as were were packing up to leave: what […]

Meet the author! Waterstones West End, Edinburgh, on 12th December

I’ll be at Waterstones in Edinburgh’s west end on Thursday, December 12th, at 6pm, to do a short reading as part of Waterstones’ Christmas Cracker event. This will be my first live event. I am apprehensive. Also there will be James Robertson, Angela Jackson, Andrea Gillies, and Gavin Francis. Exalted company! Join us for readings, […]

Miscellany № 40: Emoji Dick and the ANGRY Full Stop

With Winterval approaching, and bearing in mind the concomitant need to find gifts for our nearest and dearest, may I present a gift that I would dearly love to receive: Emoji Dick; or . This is, as editor Fred Benenson explains, “a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese […]

Shiny Characters № 3: Hand & Eye Letterpress

This is part of an irregular series of articles on the technologies and techniques behind hot metal typesetting. Read previous articles here. Hand & Eye Letterpress occupies one of the arches under a Victorian railway viaduct in Pinchin Street, London, just a few blocks east of the gleaming City of London. A cobbled road runs […]

Miscellany № 39: smart quotes for smart people

As you know, the American edition of Shady Characters was published on September 24th — which is, of course, National Punctuation Day. In honour of this auspicious event (National Punctuation Day that is, not the book’s publication), Jason Santa Maria, the polymath founder of Editorially and A Book Apart, launched a simple website to promote […]

A reader asks: what does this say?

A few weeks back, reader Paul Tanimura left a comment asking for help in identifying the symbols shown in this image. It’s a piece of embroidered brocade fabric that has been used to wrap a document describing a Japanese family tree, and though it bears (to my eyes at least) some distinctly manga-esque animal figures […]