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A review by neilrcoulter
Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston
5.0
Shady Characters was an absolute pleasure to read. People who write about language often fall into certain traps: condescending, arrogant, pedantic, name-dropping, forced humor. Somehow, Keith Houston avoids all of that and finds exactly the right tone in this book. He has great information to share, and he writes it in a fun, engaging, welcoming way.
☞ I highly recommend the book to anyone who loves history, language, and the history of language.
It might seem like writing about punctuation and typographical marks would be a rather narrow topic. But as Houston explains one kind of mark in each chapter, he opens a panorama of history and culture that is dizzyingly fascinating. We go back to the library of Alexandria, graffiti in Rome, medieval scribe annotations, Gutenberg’s obsessive line-justification, the first novels of Richardson and Fielding, Abraham Lincoln, twentieth-century journalism, and the huge influence of Christianity on all aspects of the written word. Each chapter looks at a different mark or symbol, and the stories are concise and always interesting—pilcrow,* interrobang (long one of my favorites; you know what it looks like, right‽), octothorpe,† ampersand, the @ symbol, asterisk and dagger,‡ hyphen, dash, manicule, quotation marks, and irony and sarcasm (of course~).
I loved this book. I will probably read it again and will definitely recommend it to my students and fellow editors.
* The symbol I think of as a paragraph marker.
† Now more commonly known as the “hashtag.”
‡ And the double dagger, and much more.
☞ I highly recommend the book to anyone who loves history, language, and the history of language.
It might seem like writing about punctuation and typographical marks would be a rather narrow topic. But as Houston explains one kind of mark in each chapter, he opens a panorama of history and culture that is dizzyingly fascinating. We go back to the library of Alexandria, graffiti in Rome, medieval scribe annotations, Gutenberg’s obsessive line-justification, the first novels of Richardson and Fielding, Abraham Lincoln, twentieth-century journalism, and the huge influence of Christianity on all aspects of the written word. Each chapter looks at a different mark or symbol, and the stories are concise and always interesting—pilcrow,* interrobang (long one of my favorites; you know what it looks like, right‽), octothorpe,† ampersand, the @ symbol, asterisk and dagger,‡ hyphen, dash, manicule, quotation marks, and irony and sarcasm (of course~).
I loved this book. I will probably read it again and will definitely recommend it to my students and fellow editors.
* The symbol I think of as a paragraph marker.
† Now more commonly known as the “hashtag.”
‡ And the double dagger, and much more.