Shady Characters

Congratulations to Mykola Leonovych on winning a copy of the new edition of Ciemne typki, the Polish translation of Shady Characters! I asked entrants about their favourite marks of punctuation and why they liked them. Here’s Mykola’s winning entry:

My favourite punctuation mark is probably the fleuron. I use ❧ to mark a personal section of my email newsletter, and sometimes a beginning of a poem (for that I also like the asterism, ⁂). I think that any font with a fleuron is more lively than without.

Indeed! I’m grateful to Mykola for reminding me about the fleuron and asterism, a pair of marks that have somehow not featured prominently here on the blog. And he makes a good point about fonts and shady characters: in the same way that Van Halen demanded a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed to figure out which concert promoters had read their contract and which hadn’t, for me the absence of a fleuron or other unusual marks is a sign of a typeface lacking a bit of verve. Conversely, a good asterism or pilcrow is a sign of a designer with a sense of history.

If you’d to see Mykola deploy a fleuron in person, his newsletter Повільна людина (The Slow Person), where he writes in Ukrainian “about books, culture, and typography”, lives here.

Mykola’s copy of Ciemne typki will be in the post soon, and thank you all for entering!