Errata

In researching the history of the interrobang I’ve been lucky enough to have corresponded with Penny Speckter, Martin K. Speckter’s widow and an ardent supporter of the mark of punctuation he created. After publishing The Interrobang, part 1, she got in touch to let me know that Martin in fact did not lobby for the inclusion of the interrobang in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface (as mentioned in the newspaper article I cited to that effect1) but that instead it came about purely by chance. I’m happy to set the record straight here for Mrs Speckter — her support has been invaluable and is typical of the generosity and enthusiasm of many of the people I’ve been in contact with over the course of putting together this material.

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The Interrobang, part 1 of 2

1962 was a momentous year for the United States of America. John Glenn became the first American, and only the second human, to reach orbit;1 the Kennedy administration successfully negotiated the nuclear tightrope of the Cuban missile crisis, taking the world within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war in the process;2 and NASA launched AT&T’s Telstar, the world’s first telecommunications satellite, ushering in a new era of instantaneous global communications.3 Consumer society too was reaching new heights: advertising ruled, and the ad men were at the peak of their game.

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The Pilcrow, part 3 of 3

Taking pride of place at the head of every new paragraph, the pilcrow had carved out a literal niche for itself at the heart of late medieval writing. Boldly inked by the rubricator, pilcrows grew ever more elaborate and time-consuming to add. Unfortunately the deadline is not a modern invention; occasionally, time would run out before the rubricator could complete his work and the white space carefully reserved for the pilcrow went undecorated. With the advent of the printing press, the volume of printed documents to be rubricated grew exponentially and it became increasingly difficult to attend to them all. The pilcrow became a ghost, and the indented paragraph was born in its stead.1

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The Pilcrow, part 2 of 3

Compared to Rome’s traditional pagan religion, Christianity was altogether a different beast. Whereas paganism relied on oral tradition and its practices varied according to local custom, Christianity instead emphasised conformity and written scriptures.1 If Judaism had been the prototypical religion of the Book, Christianity embodied this ideal with an unprecedented vigour, possessing a symbiotic relationship with the written word which simultaneously drove the evolution of punctuation and benefited from a concrete, written dogma. After all, the Word of God had to be transmitted with as little ambiguity as possible.2

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The Pilcrow, part 1 of 3

This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.)

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