Keith Houston's Blog, page 23

Announcing The Book: a new book and a new website

Now that Shady Characters has been published, I can reveal what I’ve been working on for the past few months. The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time will be published in late 2015 by W. W. Norton, and I’m delighted to say that the esteemed Brendan Curry […]

Miscellany № 38: the alternate history of the telephone keypad

Publication and its attendant excitements have taken up much of the past month, and I have a stack of punctuation-related matters to catch up with. Without further ado, let’s get on with the show! Readers of Shady Characters (whether in book or blog form) will recall that the octothorpe (#) came by its rather esoteric […]

Book launch competition: we have a winner

As I mentioned recently, I handed out copies of the Shady Characters quiz at the book launch party here in Edinburgh. I promised the attendees that one winner would receive a copy of the US edition of the book, and I’ve finally got round to tallying up the scores. Tom Pilcher and Chris Mackinnon both […]

Publication week round-up

Shady Characters has been on sale for over a week, and now that the furore has died down a little I thought I’d collect links to all the articles I wrote in support of the book. Some of these have already been featured here; others were posted on Twitter, Facebook and so on, and a […]

Shady Characters, the quiz

The launch party for Shady Characters went swimmingly! The bar was packed with family and friends, both old and new; many books were signed, and much wine was drunk. My mum brought along a fountain pen that had once belonged to my grandfather, and it was an honour to be able to sign books with […]

And the winners are…

…Paul Carvill (@paulcarvill) and John Stuart (@biostuart)! Congratulations to them both. Paul and John’s 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 UK edition of Shady Characters […]

The Shady Characters Launch Party

Shady Characters has launched, and we’re having a party to celebrate! We’ll be at Pickles on Broughton Street, Edinburgh, from 6-8pm on Tuesday October 1st. Click here to add the event to your calendar. For some reason, I’m not allowed to sell books at the party. This is going to sound incredibly gauche, but if […]

It’s publication day (part 2)!

Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and Other Typographical Curiosities is now available in the UK. (I checked for myself at my local Waterstones and collected some documentary evidence, left. The recent excision of the Waterstone[’]s apostrophe still galls me.) You can order a hardback or digital copy from Amazon.co.uk, The Book Depository, Penguin, Play.com or Waterstones. […]

It’s publication (and punctuation) day!

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks is now available to order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Indiebound and Powell’s.[*] If you’re still on the fence as to whether to buy the book, you can now take a look at a few sample pages over at W. W. Norton’s […]

A reminder…

…that there’s still time to enter the competition to win one of two copies of the UK edition of Shady Characters. Go here to enter, and good luck!