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

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Most of the samples (reproduced in her book) show poorly "typeset" documents (obviously prepared using the primitive word processing programs of the era by people who had no training in typography).

It’s a fitting design choice for a book that takes it readers through the history of the written word. Hundreds of books about books have been published during the past century…I will not claim that this one is the very best of all time. The debate that has taken place for ages to arrive at some indication of irony and sarcasm in text is particularly fun. There are references to a stabbing, poisonings, and a drowning, but these are never related in any graphic detail aside from passing mentions of blood.

And in each chapter, Houston pulls together seemingly unrelated threads of history into a fascinating story of the origin of a familiar typographical or punctuation mark. TI had never meant to build the Cal Tech itself, and so, years later, when it had solved its production issues, it handed the design to Canon for refinement into a more consumer-friendly device. Each chapter explains a bit about the mark and then goes through its history from ancient through modern times. Written with humour, examples, and many illustrations, this is a book for those who like typography and are keen to know the history of symbols used (now and in the past) in print materials. It would be tempting to lay the praise for this lovely book solely at the feet of Houston's engaging writing skills.

the owner simply could not afford the necessary investment to retire his old system and install desk top publishing equipment as the remaining overhead made the company non-competitive with the developing "cottage industry" of independent "DTP" services. Challenging missions into the Arctic to monitor a Soviet Navy exercise from Mildenhall lasting up to 12 hours, made even more difficult by fog and snow at this British airbase.I was particularly fascinated by the detailed description of the typesetting used by Johannes Gutenberg for his 42 line bible, which was, after all, the 'Star Wars: A New Hope' of books. But the political tension takes a back seat when resident eccentric Dorothy Springfield becomes convinced her beloved husband, Edward, is dead, and that the rat claiming to be him is actually a fraud. In doing so, they sacrifice something of the message in pursuit of their ostentatious displays of learning.

The slide rule portion allowed a practiced pilot or navigator to compute air speed given a distance travelled and a time taken (or, indeed, to compute any one of those quantities given the other tw While the story itself is self-contained, it’s easy to see how the world of Shady Hollow and its denizens deserve to be expanded, explored, and even revisited time and again.I only finished Shady Characters an hour ago and if you put gun to my child's head I don't think I could provide a decent description of how the octothorp or ampersand came to be. Now the fox and raven have to delve into the dark world of academia and archaeology to determine which creature thought they were clever enough to get away with the perfect murder. May have some underlining and highlighting of text and some writing in the margins, but there are no missing pages or anything else that would compromise the readability or legibility of the text. Find out in this upbeat picture book that teaches kids to speak their minds and stand up for what they believe in. Overall, somewhat interesting, but probably of most interest to those that already have an interest in (or obsession with) typographical marks.