Keith Houston's Blog, page 6

Calculator of the day: the slide rule

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US this coming Tuesday, the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d start a series of posts about a few of my favourite calculators.

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Win a copy of Empire of the Sum!

This is your chance to win one of two free copies of Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator! To enter, leave a comment on this post with a valid email address so that I can contact you in the event that you win.

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Narbo Martius: a Shady Char­ac­ters field trip

Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France. Narbonne is an old Roman town, once called Narbo Martius, that forms one point of a shallow triangle with the medieval walled city of Carcassonne and the bullfighting mecca of Béziers. It’s a nice little place; somewhere between a tourist trap and a working town, with plenty to see and do in and around the local area.

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Miscellany № 100: hitting the century

I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years and six-ish months. For reference, here’s the first ever miscellany post, published way back in November 2011. Amusingly, it is unnumbered. Who’d have thought I’d have needed more than a single post to tie up some loose ends?

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Books: a #patentedpodcast with Dallas Campbell

I very much enjoyed recording this podcast on the history of books with Dallas Campbell. I haven’t even heard it myself yet – why not have a listen and let me know what you think?

Miscellany № 99: minting the dollar

I was in St Andrews a couple of weeks ago with my wife Leigh to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. St Andrews is a picturesque, if slightly exposed town on the north coast of Fife, in Scotland, and is famous mostly for two things: the Old Course, being the oldest golf course in the world; and its university, which is the oldest in Scotland and the third oldest in the English speaking world.

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Miscellany № 98: a novelistic conundrum

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks:

What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or “Going Postal”?

So far I’ve found “epigraph”, which is not specific enough, and “taster”, which possibly is not what book people would call it.

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Miscellany № 97: interrobang archaeology, part 2

As we head towards the holiday season, 2022 edition, good news for next year’s gift-giving conundrums: my esteemed editor, Mr Brendan Curry, has rubber-stamped the Empire of the Sum manuscript, which has now started its journey through the W. W. Norton publication pipeline. Between now and the summer of 2023 it will be copyedited, proofread, indexed, designed, typeset and many other things beside, and it will be much better for it.

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Miscellany № 96: EPA

Esteemed Norwegian typefoundry Monokrom (who, of course, designed the fonts used here at Shady Characters), tweeted a while back about a Unicode character called the “Wiggly Exclamation Mark”. Here’s the relevant snippet of text:

I’d never come across this mark before, and some digging revealed that it came not from the Unicode standard itself but rather a proposal to add characters relating to the so-called “English Phonotypic Alphabet”, or EPA.1 The EPA, in turn, is an English spelling reform ...

Museum of London: a Shady Characters field trip

Apologies for the relaxed pace of posts here; I’ve been hard at work on the manuscript for Empire of the Sum, which is currently ping-ponging between New York and Birmingham as my editor helps knock it into shape. There isn’t much time left for writing anything else!

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