I had an enjoyable chat last night with Katy Steinmetz of Time.com about this yearly festival of punctuation (you can read her article on the subject here), but of arguably even greater importance is that the Shady Characters book is exactly one year old today! Happy birthday to it! (Or to me. How does that work, exactly?) Also, what better day than today, then, to reveal the cover of the forthcoming paperback edition?
This is a quick note to thank Tim Nau for his eagle-eyed contributions to the Shady Characters errata. As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below if you come across an error in any edition or format of Shady Characters. I’d appreciate it very much, and I’d be very happy to acknowledge you in future editions!
Like many books, a few errors slipped through the net as I wrote Shady Characters and evaded even the practised gaze of Brendan Curry, my editor at W. W. Norton, and of Rachelle Mandik, our excellent copy-editor. Unlike some books, however, I’ve been lucky enough to have a cadre of eagle-eyed readers to pick up and help correct those mistakes. Without further ado, then, I give you the first instalment of Shady Characters’ errata. There will be more to come, I’m sure, as more editions are published (speaking of which, keep an eye out for the American paperback later this year!), but for now I must thank Mark Forsyth, Eric Johnson, Zoran Minderovic, Bill Pollack, Patrick Reagh, Jeff Shay, and Liz B. Veronis for helping point out and fix these errors.
Now that Shady Characters has been published, I can reveal what I’ve been working on for the past few months. The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time will be published in late 2015 by W. W. Norton, and I’m delighted to say that the esteemed Brendan Curry will assume editing duties once again.
As I mentioned recently, I handed out copies of the Shady Characters quiz at the book launch party here in Edinburgh. I promised the attendees that one winner would receive a copy of the US edition of the book, and I’ve finally got round to tallying up the scores. Tom Pilcher and Chris Mackinnon both scored top marks, but random.org, my go-to source for numerical chaos, has selected Tom as the winner. Congratulations to Tom, commiserations to Chris, and thanks again to all who came to the launch and took part in the competition!