I’m happy to announce that I’ll be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday 16th August, when Gerry Cambridge and I will be talking with Stuart Kelly about printing, typography, shady characters and — of course! — books. As the EIBF programme puts it:
You remember the octothorpe, don’t you? This plucky little mark evolved from the Roman abbreviation lb for libra pondo, or pound weight, and into the barred medieval ‘℔’ before settling into its modern form of ‘#’. Along the way it picked up a cacophony of mostly reasonable nicknames: pound sign; number sign; hash sign; hex; grid; crunch; pig pen; square; tic-tac-toe.1,2 Sometime during the 1960s, however, it acquired another name — ‘octothorpe’ — that is unreasonable by design. The roots of that name lie in the hallowed corridors of Bell Labs, but today we’re interested in one of the false etymologies that cling to it like a bad smell:
There’s no miscellany post this weekend, but by way of compensation I might point you towards tomorrow’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth programme, to be broadcast at 4pm here in the UK. In it I’ll be talking with the estimable Michael Rosen about punctuation, ancient Greece, medieval manuscripts, Winston Churchill and more — it was great fun to record the episode, and I hope it’ll be fun to listen to as well.
It’s January, 1776. You’re a printer in Delaware, one of thirteen restive American colonies chafing against British rule. The Continental Congress, the colonies’ nascent collective government, has recently passed an act creating its own currency and you’ve been tasked with creating Delaware’s issue of banknotes.1 This is your response:
Publication of The Book is still a few months away (if you haven’t circled August 23 on your calendar with a fat red marker pen, I urge you to do so right now), but I thought it might be nice to take a closer look at the book itself, both inside and out.