book – Page 13 – Shady Characters

Shady Characters in Polish is Ciemne typki

January 4, 2016

First things first: happy new year! Welcome back.

For me, the new year has started with a bang: courtesy of Robert Oleś at Varsovian publishers d2d.pl, Shady Characters is now available in Polish! Translated by Magdalena Komorowska and entitled Ciemne typki (I am reliably informed that this is quite a clever pun in Polish), the book is available now from empik.com and other online stores. If you read Polish, have a Polish friend who might enjoy a book about unusual punctuation, or, hell, you already have an English edition and you’re just a damn completist, now’s the time to lay your hands on a copy.

It’s (traditional Chinese) paperback publication day!

June 8, 2015

Another day, another edition of Shady Characters! The handsome book on the right is the Chinese complex characters (also called traditional characters) edition, courtesy of Taiwan’s Rye Field Publications. The cover design is by Chang Lien Hung, aka elf-19, and I can promise you that it is far better looking in real life than my terrible photo makes it out to be. It is available now for ¥360. I’d love to hear what Chinese-literate readers might think of it — if you lay your hands on a copy, please leave a comment below or drop me a line via the contact form!

Miscellany № 61: verbal irony seeks meaningful relationship. No, really.

April 13, 2015

Well, hello there.

You all know the handsome fellow that adorns the cover of this book, don’t you? This is the ironieteken, the brainchild of type designer Bas Jacobs, and it is used to terminate an ironic statement.1 Specifically, it is intended to punctuate verbal irony, where a speaker or writer says one thing but means another. It is, to my mind, the most visually convincing irony mark to date — but for the purposes of today’s short post, it is merely one of the many suitors who have tried and failed to win irony’s hand in marriage.

UK paperback competition: the winners!

March 1, 2015

Ladies and gentlemen: please put your hands together for Álvaro Franca and Yoni Weiss, winners of the UK paperback giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all commenters, tweeters and Facebook users who replied, retweeted, or favourited the original posts about the competition. (Both Álvaro (@alvaroefe) and Yoni (@yonimweiss) entered via Twitter.) Their copies of the UK paperback edition of Shady Characters will be on their way soon.

It’s paperback publication day!

October 20, 2014

It barely seems a year since the Shady Characters hardback was launched. That’s because it was only a year ago, and yet here we are: the paperback is published today in the USA!

Jarrod Taylor designed the excellent new cover; Mark Forsyth, Eric Johnson, Zoran Minderovic, Tim Nau, Jeff Norman, Bill Pollack, Patrick Reagh, Jeff Shay, and Liz B. Veronis all helped weed out the errata that slipped through the net in the hardback edition. Thank you all!