Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks
is now available to order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Indiebound and Powell’s. If you’re still on the fence as to whether to buy the book, you can now take a look at a few sample pages over at W. W. Norton’s account on Medium. Perhaps Judith Abbate’s excellent typography or Jason Booher’s vibrant cover will sway you!
Two long-awaited parcels — one from W. W. Norton, the other from Particular Books — arrived this week. With just less than a month to go before publication, I now have some copies of the finished books! They’re both rather amazing.
Would you like to get your hands on an early copy of Shady Characters? W. W. Norton is giving away fifteen copies of the US edition of the book through Goodreads — where, coincidentally enough, it has earned a solid four-star rating. If you’d like the chance to add your voice to the reviews, head over to Goodreads before the end of today to enter the competition!
Those innovators who have designed new typographic symbols make up an eclectic bunch. Interrobang creator Martin K. Speckter was an ad man by trade and a printer by temperament; Bas Jacobs, designer of the ironieteken, and Choz Cunningham, creator of the snark, are type designers; and Doug and Paul Sak of Sarcasm Inc., responsible for the much-maligned SarcMark©, are an accountant and engineer respectively.
Ladies and gentlemen: having revealed the US cover last month, it’s now the turn of the UK edition. Published by Particular Books, a Penguin imprint, the UK edition of the Shady Characters book is now available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk,
The Book Depository and Waterstones.