Long-time readers will remember that 99% Invisible, the wide-ranging podcast hosted by Roman Mars and produced in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, featured an episode on the octothorpe back in December 2014. It’s a great listen: 99PI producer Avery Trufelman managed to track down Doug Kerr and Lorne Asplund, two of the engineers at Bell Labs who were instrumental in placing the ‘#’ on the then-new telephone keypad and later christening it as the “octothorpe”, to get the story behind the mark’s rebirth in the computer age.
Well, I’m happy to report that 99PI has just released a new episode on another familiar shady character: the interrobang! I first spoke to 99PI producer Joe Rosenberg about Martin K. Speckter’s (in)famous mark of punctuation back in 2012, so it has been a slow and winding road for this particular instalment, but it is finally here and it was worth the wait. Joe interviewed Martin’s widow, Penny, to learn more about the interrobang’s creation, and also talked to one Judge Frank Easterbrook, perhaps the most distinguished person ever to use an interrobang in anger. The full episode is available now, and it is great. Many thanks to Joe for sticking with the subject for all these years!
The featured image here shows sketches for the extra bold weight of Richard Isbell’s typeface “Americana”. Thanks to Fritz Klinke on Flickr for the use of his image.