First, thank you to everyone who came along to the Waterstones Christmas Cracker on Thursday! It was great to see so many familiar faces there, and to meet some new ones too. James Robertson, who read from his new novel The Professor of Truth, asked me a question as were were packing up to leave: what is the name of the ‘§’ symbol?
With Winterval approaching, and bearing in mind the concomitant need to find gifts for our nearest and dearest, may I present a gift that I would dearly love to receive: Emoji Dick; or 🐳. This is, as editor Fred Benenson explains, “a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji”; Shady Characters readers will be well aware of the general concept of emoticons, of course, and emoji are effectively an expanded set of such symbols composed of graphical images rather than typographic marks.
As you know, the American edition of Shady Characters was published on September 24th — which is, of course, National Punctuation Day. In honour of this auspicious event (National Punctuation Day that is, not the book’s publication), Jason Santa Maria, the polymath founder of Editorially and A Book Apart, launched a simple website to promote Smart Quotes for Smart People. As Jason succinctly explains:
A few weeks back, reader Paul Tanimura left a comment asking for help in identifying the symbols shown in this image. It’s a piece of embroidered brocade fabric that has been used to wrap a document describing a Japanese family tree, and though it bears (to my eyes at least) some distinctly manga-esque animal figures the family claims that it hasn’t been touched since the last entry was made in 1782. Paul writes:
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.