news – Page 17 – Shady Characters

№ ⸮ ‽ ℔ ⁊ ⸿  — or, a cavalcade of characters

March 27, 2016

At the heart of Shady Characters’ recent redesign are the text and display typefaces of Satyr and Faunus, both designed by Sindre Bremnes of Norway’s Monokrom type studio. Shady Characters, of course, is all about unusual marks of punctuation, and I was glad to see that both typefaces came complete with a handy selection of special characters. Even so, there were a few marks missing: the interrobang for one; the numero symbol I use in many post titles for another. As I chatted to Frode Helland of Monokrom about the minutiae of web fonts, though, he suggested that he and Sindre might be able to add some new characters to help Shady Characters live up to its name.

Miscellany № 71 — ‘⋮’ redux

March 13, 2016

Last time round, inspired by Marcin Wichary’s tweet, I wrote a short post about the curious case of the character ‘⋮’, which was present on some of the earliest typewriter keyboards but that mysteriously disappeared from later machines. The comments came in thick and fast, and reader Thomas A. Fine was moved to carry out his own investigation into the life and death of the elusive vertical ellipsis.

Miscellany № 70 — ‘⋮’, ‘⌨︎’ & ‘¶’

February 28, 2016

Computers are not typewriters: this is evident. Even so, it’s easy to forget that Christopher Latham Sholes’ mechanical marvel was the wellspring of the QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and similar keyboards we use to interact with our laptops, tablets and smartphones. Sholes and his invention play supporting roles in the Shady Characters book, too: the typewriter helped popularise the @-symbol even as it savaged the em and en dashes, but there was always one symbol on Sholes’ embryonic QWERTY keyboard that I never quite got to grips with. Take a look at the leftmost key on the third row of Sholes’ keyboard, as shown in his 1878 patent for “Improvement in type-writing machines”.1 What on earth is that? Or rather, what on earth is this: ‘⋮’?

Shady Characters at the New York Times

February 22, 2016

I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the kerfuffle currently engulfing the humble circumflex accent (ê). You can read the piece here — let me know what you think about it in the comments or, if you’d prefer, drop me a line via the Contact page. (Many thanks to Jessica Svendsen for the use of the image that accompanies the article!)

The Book, revealed!

February 21, 2016

Ladies and gentlemen: The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is now available for pre-order! You can order the hardcover in the USA from W. W. Norton, Amazon.com, Indiebound or Powell’s. In the rest of the world, order from Amazon.co.uk, The Book Depository or Waterstones. It will be published in August.