Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

from akblanchard

Keith Houston takes readers on an entertaining, if digressive, tour of the non-letter keys of the QWERTY keyboard in Shady Characters. He traces the surprising history of familiar symbols such as the pound sign (which he insists on calling an "octothorpe", even though I've never heard that term a...

from bluepigeon

Another great Goodreads first reads win!I think I am rather naive when it comes to history, or I lack imagination. Mostly, I am always taken by surprise to discover that writing in the computer age or the internet age, or whatever age you want to call this, has many strong ties with the past. And...

from

A quick fun read, most geared to the the general reader (like me, I'm interested in language, gammar,fonts and such, just not obsessed or pedantic about it). A good break of non-fiction.

from TJWilson

A fun book for typographers and anyone that's interested in writing. There is a lot to be said about the democratic creation of language and its rules. In this book, their is a very fascinating perusal of the politics of thought on the page. Good writer too. Can't imagine how much care it took to...

from

A snack-fest of history and typography, the book is divided into stand-alone chapters about the pilcrow, the interrobang, the octothorpe, the ampersand, the @ symbol, the asterisk and dagger, the hyphen, the dash, the manicule, quotation marks, and the various attempts to create irony marks. Some...