5 Punctuation Marks That Look Nothing Like They Used To
I wrote an article for the Huffington Post
, and yes, I gave it a clickbait headline. Enjoy!
It’s paperback publication day!
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!
Paperback competition: we have a winner!
Or rather, two winners. Congratulations to commenter Lyla and Twitter user @donserifa! Theirs names were picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest. Their copies of the paperback edition of Shady Characters will be on their way very soon.
It’s National Punctuation Day!
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?
Pilcrows and poker chips: an interview with Jim Ford
Last month, you may remember, I featured an image of two manicules drawn by Eric Gill for Gill Sans but which never made it into the finished typeface. I lamented the fact that some shady characters just don’t get the love they deserve, citing the fact that Gill’s manicules still don’t exist in Gill Sans, even in its most modern digital incarnations.