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Miscellany № 91: interrobang archaeology

August 16, 2021

Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it? Here are a few somewhat recent stories of a typographic or emojinal (?) bent that Shady Characters readers may enjoy.

If you recall, the interrobang came into being back in 1962 and was immortalised just a few years later in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface of 1967. As the first interrobang to take its place in a fully-fledged typeface, Isbell’s “open” version has a reasonable claim to being the canonical form of the character. The holotype of the interrobang, so to speak.

A reminder: email subscriptions are changing

July 4, 2021

As I mentioned last week, email subscriptions are changing. If you subscribe to Shady Characters by email, or you’d like to do so, please read last week’s post to learn more. This will be the last post that goes out to existing email subscribers, so please make sure you update your subscription soon!

Changes to email subscriptions

June 30, 2021

Feedburner, the Google service that Shady Characters uses to send email notifications of new posts, is closing down its email service. As such, I’ve updated the subscription widget at the bottom of the site to use WordPress.com’s email subscription feature instead.

Miscellany № 90: 🌀🪐☆✻, or, the grawlix

April 29, 2021

This sentence:

I really #\*$@% want to visit a museum.

combines a truthful statement with what is known as a grawlix — a pile of non-alphanumeric characters intended to represent (and censor) a profanity.

I’ve been meaning to write about grawlixes for what is probably a few years now, but which, thanks to the ongoing coronavirus catastrophe, feels more like a few decades. The word (though not the typographical practice) was coined by the American newspaper cartoonist Mort Walker, whose bona fides derive from his creation, in 1950, of a comic strip called Beetle Bailey that he continued to produce until his death in 2018. (A 1954 spin-off, Hi and Lois, is carried on by his sons.)1 Walker introduced the grawlix and its relatives to the world at large in a 1975 book called Backstage at the Strips that, in turn, made reference to an earlier “presentation” concerning the grawlix:2,3

Announcing a new book: Empire of the Sum

February 7, 2021

It has been a long time coming, but I’m pleased to announce that I’m working on a new book. Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator will be published by W. W. Norton in late 2022 or thereabouts, and Brendan Curry will take the editing reins once again.