It’s the 24th of September, which means it’s National Punctuation Day! To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of Wydawnictwo Karakter’s gorgeous Polish edition of Shady Characters. (My terrible photo does not do it justice – this is a great-looking book.)
Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it? Here are a few somewhat recent stories of a typographic or emojinal (?) bent that Shady Characters readers may enjoy.
If you recall, the interrobang came into being back in 1962 and was immortalised just a few years later in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface of 1967. As the first interrobang to take its place in a fully-fledged typeface, Isbell’s “open” version has a reasonable claim to being the canonical form of the character. The holotype of the interrobang, so to speak.
As I mentioned last week, email subscriptions are changing. If you subscribe to Shady Characters by email, or you’d like to do so, please read last week’s post to learn more. This will be the last post that goes out to existing email subscribers, so please make sure you update your subscription soon!
Feedburner, the Google service that Shady Characters uses to send email notifications of new posts, is closing down its email service. As such, I’ve updated the subscription widget at the bottom of the site to use WordPress.com’s email subscription feature instead.
Hadrian’s Wall is quite a thing. Its construction is linked to a visit to Britain, in 122 CE, of the Emperor Hadrian, although work may have been underway before then. Conventional wisdom says that Hadrian wanted to keep the restive Celts out of Roman Britain to the south; another interpretation is that the wall was a means to collect tolls and duties from whomever might have cause to pass through it, Celt or otherwise. Whatever the case, the finished wall was eighty miles long, running almost from coast to coast, and it became the abiding symbol of Roman rule in the island of Britain.1,2