Miscellany № 99: minting the dollar

I was in St Andrews a couple of weeks ago with my wife Leigh to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. St Andrews is a picturesque, if slightly exposed town on the north coast of Fife, in Scotland, and is famous mostly for two things: the Old Course, being the oldest golf course in the world; and its university, which is the oldest in Scotland and the third oldest in the English speaking world.

Like most towns that host a centuries-old university, St Andrews boasts and/or suffers eye-watering housing costs, sticky-floored bars beloved by students and loathed by locals, and at least one quirky, ageless bookshop that looks like it has escaped from a Terry Pratchett novel. Cambridge has The Haunted Bookshop; Oxford has St Philip’s Books; Edinburgh has Armchair Books.* We came across a fantastic example in St Andrews in the form of J&G Innes on South Street, one of the town’s main shopping streets:

A picture of J&G Innes, booksellers in St Andrews, taken from South Street.

J&G Innes, booksellers in St Andrews, as taken from South Street. (Photo by the author.)

The Innes building has a long association with paper, printing and books. From 1620 until 1740 the site hosted a printing press established by one Edward Raban, before being replaced with a larger edifice that housed a barber’s shop.1 The attic of that shop, in turn, would soon house another printing press (of which more below), before the building was rented in 1892 by the prioprietors of a local newspaper, the St Andrews Citizen, and then bought outright by them in 1927. That’s when the building was renovated in a faux-medieval style, latticed windows and all.2

Oh, that that paper, the Citizen? It was established by a Mr Robert Tullis, a scion of the Tullis papermaking dynasty, whose mill at nearby Markinch closed in 2015 after more than two centuries.3

But at least as interesting as the shop’s commercial and architectural history is this sign above the door:

A picture of a painted sign that reads:
The sign above the door at J&G Innes, St Andrews. (Photo by the author.)

Here’s the wording in full:

Here stood the house of BAILIE BELL, who, before 1744, was an eager co-worker with Alexander Wilson, the father of Scottish type-founding, and JOHN BAINE in whose type-foundry in Philadelphia the first $ sign was cast in 1797.

Quite a few degrees of separation to unpick here. To wrong-foot us from the start, it turns out that “Bailie” is not a name but a title, that of “a municipal officer or magistrate, corresponding to […] alderman, next in rank to the Provost”.4 Bailie Bell’s Christian name was Andrew, and he was a well-to-do barber whose family was said to have been the first in St Andrews to serve tea in china cups.5 It was Bell who levelled Edward Raban’s modest print shop to build a rather more assertive building that served as his home and place of business.

It seems (although the records are muddy) that shortly after the construction of the new building, Bell began to collaborate with Alexander Wilson and John Baine, a lapsed surgeon and a type founder respectively, with the aim of pioneering some new method of printing.6 But Wilson and Baine’s partnership was dissolved in 1749, and Bell exited stage left some time before that.7

Wilson went on to become professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow, but Baine kept up his typefounding business and eventually emigrated to Philadelphia to carry on his work.6,7 (He may, in fact, have been the first typefounder to arrive in the American colonies.8) Baine’s grandson inherited the family business upon Baine’s death in 1790 before selling up to in 1799 to another pair of printing Scots, Archibald Binny and James Ronaldson.7,9 And it was Binny, finally, who would cast the first ‘$’.

The Spanish coat of arms, showing a shield surmounted by a crown and flanked by the pillars of Hercules.
The Spanish coat of arms, showing a shield surmounted by a crown and flanked by the pillars of Hercules. (Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

The roots of the dollar sign are disputed. The leading theory holds that ‘$’ is a stylised abbreviation for the Spanish American pesos (ps), on which the new US currency was based.10 A competing but shakier notion says that the symbol is derived from a double-barred Portuguese symbol called the cifrão, which once denominated “thousands” but now serves mostly as a currency symbol in its own right. And yet another says that ‘$’ is derived from the “pillars of Hercules” that form part of the Spanish coat of arms. These heraldic devices represent the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, on Spain’s southern coast, where the Mediterranean funnels out into the Atlantic.11

Whatever the dollar sign’s origins, what is certain is that the first printed dollar sign was impressed in Philadelphia around the turn of the eighteenth century — and that it came from the hand of Archibald Binny, Bailie Bell’s work colleague thrice removed. Binny was a political migrant, having agitated in Britain for universal suffrage and yearly sittings of parliament, and the ideological freedom of the United States suited him better than the stifling conservatism of his native country. Arriving at New York around 1795, and establishing a partnership with James Ronaldson, a baker, Binny allied his typefounding skills with Ronaldson’s capital so that the pair soon headed the only major typefounding firm in the USA, supplying type for the majority of likeminded émigrés in the new state of Pennsylvania.8,12

At some point, then, with America’s coinage stabilised and ‘$’ established as its (hand)written symbol, there came a need to print that same symbol. As near as anyone has been able to tell, that moment arrived in 1801. That was the year in which a pamphlet entitled “Facts Respecting the Bank of North America” was published in two editions by two different printers. John Wyeth and William Dickson were both customers of Binny & Ronaldson — understandably, really, since there were few other avenues via which to acquire movable type — and both of them used identical printed dollar signs in their respective versions of the pamphlet. The first printed dollar sign had arrived, and, by a process of elimination, it must have come from the foundry of Binny & Ronaldson. There’s no evidence on precisely when Binny carved his new ‘$’ letter punch — his firm did not issue its first type specimen until some years later, and even then the ‘$’ was absent — but J&G Innes’s hand-painted date of 1797 may not be wide of the mark.13

So there we have it: the unexpected connection between a bookshop in St Andrews and the first printed dollar sign, cast by an emigrant Scot in the post-revolutionary United States.

1.
O’Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. “St Andrews Type Foundry”. MacTutor.

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2.
“The Citizen Office”.

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3.
“The Rise and Fall of Tullis Russell”. The Courier. May 22, 2017.

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4.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language. “Bailie”. Accessed March 4, 2023.

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5.
“Review of ‘The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell, D.D.’”. The Athenaeum, 1844, 965-968.

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6.
Stronach, George, and Roger Hutchins. Wilson, Alexander (1714–1786), Astronomer and Type Founder. Oxford University Press, 2010.

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7.
Devroye, Luc. “John Baine”. On Snot and Fonts. Accessed March 7, 2023.

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8.
Silver, Rollo G. “Typefounding As a Permanent Industry”. In Typefounding in America, 1787-1825, 3-30. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965.

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9.
Updike, Daniel Berkeley. “Types Used in the American Colonies, and Some Early American Specimens”. In Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use : A Study in Survivals, 149-158. Harvard University Press, 1927.

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10.
Nussbaum, Arthur. “Revolution and Reorganisation”. In A History of the Dollar, 35-60. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

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11.
Cajori, Florian. “New Data on the Origin and Spread of the Dollar Mark”. The Scientific Monthly 29, no. 3 (1929): 212-216.

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12.
Durey, Michael. “Thomas Paine’s Apostles: Radical Emigrés and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism”. The William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1987): 662-688.

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13.
Newman, Eric P. “The Dollar Sign: Its Written and Printed Origins”. In America’s Silver Dollars, 1-49. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1993.

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*
Readers are encouraged to weigh in with examples in their own neck of the woods. ↢

Miscellany № 98: a novelistic conundrum

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks:

What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or “Going Postal”?

So far I’ve found “epigraph”, which is not specific enough, and “taster”, which possibly is not what book people would call it.

Courtest of the Internet Archive, here’s the first page of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, taken from an original 1889 edition:

A large heading reading "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" above the heading "Chapter 1", followed by: Three invalids.—Sufferings of George and Harris.—A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies.—Useful prescriptions.—Cure for liver complaint in children.—We agree that we are overworked, and need rest.—A week on the rolling deep?—George suggests the River.—Montmorency lodges an objection.—Original motion carried by majority of three to one.
The opening page of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. (Image courtesy of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the Internet Archive.)

For the avoidance of doubt, Marc is asking about this part:

Three invalids.—Sufferings of George and Harris.—A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies.—Useful prescriptions.—Cure for liver complaint in children.—We agree that we are overworked, and need rest.—A week on the rolling deep?—George suggests the River.—Montmorency lodges an objection.—Original motion carried by majority of three to one.

It’s a sort of table of contents, really, but rather than pointing to concrete locations in the text (such as catchwords or headers), it summarises the chapter’s contents instead.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before, as I’m sure many of us have, but it isn’t something I’d ever seen given a name. Some web searching did not turn up anything very convincing, and so I forwarded Marc’s query to my editor at W. W. Norton, Mr Brendan Curry. Brendan put Norton’s finest on the job and here, lightly edited, are their responses.

First up is Rebecca Homiski, Managing Editor. (Proposed terms are in small caps.)

My first hit was on a message board with some interesting asides; here, this feature seems to be referred to as a “nutshell.” The second search result was a New Yorker article about the history of the chapter, which definitely refers to this practice but dances around a term for it.

Rebecca also mentions this intriguing link:

And then came a brief discussion of tropes which referred back to “arguments” presented before sections of Renaissance-era poems.

Here, Rebecca links to the TV Tropes website, which is a wiki that catalogues many of the conventions, themes, and clichés that appear in TV programmes, films, books, and other forms of media. Collectively, tropes. Now, TV Tropes has a trope of its own in which the word “trope” is often used as a placeholder or boilerplate term. And so, the page that to which Rebecca links — the page that describes the practice of summarising the chapter of a book — is titled “In Which a Trope Is Described”. All of which is clever, but not especially pithy as a term of reference.

Ignoring that last term, then, we find that chapter summaries may be referred to as “nutshells” or, perhaps, “arguments”.

Don Rifkin, Associate Managing Editor, weighs in with a few more examples:

On this page, they’re referred to as “chapter contents”: “Chapter contents can be useful in histories or any book with long chapters that cover a variety of people or topics. This is like a mini Table of Contents specific to each chapter.”

Words into Type has a section on them and refers to them as “synopses” (p. 252, 3rd edition, 1974).

I see no consensus on a term for them, so I would think it’s fair game what to call them.

Okay then. Let’s add “chapter contents” and “synopses” to our list.

Robert Byrne, Trade Project Editor, adds a perceptive comment:

If they had a standard name, I suspect whatever it was may have been a specialized term mostly used in the publishing biz, which is maybe why it’s hard to find any literary connoisseurs and scholars mentioning them. Which is of course why we’re now desperate to know.

Well, quite.

Marian Johnson, editor of the Norton Anthologies, also contributed some of the same definitions we’ve seen above. I’m grateful to her, and to all at Norton who got their teeth into this question, and to Marc Schulder for asking the question in the first place. The answer to that question, then, as close as we can say, is that chapter summaries can be called “nutshells”, “arguments”, “chapter contents”, or “synopses”.

Miscellany № 97: interrobang archaeology, part 2

As we head towards the holiday season, 2022 edition, good news for next year’s gift-giving conundrums: my esteemed editor, Mr Brendan Curry, has rubber-stamped the Empire of the Sum manuscript, which has now started its journey through the W. W. Norton publication pipeline. Between now and the summer of 2023 it will be copyedited, proofread, indexed, designed, typeset and many other things beside, and it will be much better for it.

Still, though, next summer is a long way off. For now, then, here are a few recent (and not so recent) stories you might find interesting.

I somehow missed the video below when it aired on Netflix back in 2018. It’s a collaboration with Vox, the news web site, and it addresses the origins, history and usage of the exclamation mark. At only fifteen minutes long, no-one would mistake it for an exhaustive treatment of a mark that has been around for five centuries or more, but it does find time to introduce our old friend, the interrobang (‽). Here’s the video:

There’s a poignant star turn at around 7:50, when the late Penny Speckter appears on screen to explain the circumstances of her husband’s creation of the interrobang. It was a jolt to see her apartment much as it had been when I visited in 2013 for a lengthy, entertaining and cocktail-fuelled audience. Now, as then, the walls were covered in bookcases that were populated in turn by both books and miniature printing presses. (For a time, she and her husband Martin had rented the apartment across the hall to hold their collection of full-size presses.)

In the video, Penny adds some colour to the story of the interrobang’s birth. Out to dinner one night, she says, Martin was fretting over the four pages left to fill in the latest issue of Type Talks, the pair’s magazine on typography in advertising. Apropos of nothing at all, he announced his idea for a new mark of punctuation and dashed off to call their agency’s favored art studio. “Is there anybody there who can draw?” The Speckters made their way to the studio and stayed for hours, hashing out* what would become the interrobang’s earliest visual forms. Here’s how they appeared in Type Talks:

Proposed interrobangs from Type Talks, March-April 1962
Proposed interrobangs from Type Talks, March-April 1962, drawn by Jack Lipton of Martin K. Speckter Associates, Inc. (Image courtesy of Penny Speckter.)

My original series of posts on the interrobang (and, of course, the Shady Characters book) picks up the story from that point onwards, opening with the publication in Type Talks of Martin’s fateful article on his new mark, but I’m glad to have learned a little more of the story!

Elsewhere, I was taken with a Guardian article on the discovery of an ivory comb inscribed with what is said to be the oldest known sentence in the oldest known alphabet: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” Not just a comb, then, but a comb for getting rid of head lice. Leave it to Mark Liberman at Language Log to get to what really matters: the letters on this comb, ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt, do not come from a conventional alphabet but rather an abjad, or an alphabet that makes do without vowels, modern examples of which include Hebrew and Arabic. Head over to the Guardian and Language Log to learn more.

Staying with Language Log, I learned from a recent post there by Victor Mair that there is renewed interest in shorthand writing as practised in ancient Greece and Rome. Mair links to an article in the Daily Beast in which Candida Moss delves into the origin, uses and users of shorthand in the ancient world. Moss invokes Cicero’s favourite amanuensis, Tiro, whom Shady Characters readers will remember as the inventor of the “Tironian et” (⁊), but there’s much more to learn and to ponder in her article.

Lastly, you may have noticed that Twitter is having a bit of a wobble in the wake of its sale to cut-rate Bond villain Elon Musk. Many Twitter users, myself included, have since created accounts on Mastodon, a decentralised social network that feels much like Twitter but which remains in independent hands. If you’ve already made the move or are thinking about doing so, you can follow Shady Characters at @shadychars@mastodon.social and my personal account at @orkneydullard@mstdn.social. I’ll still be active on Twitter, but perhaps that will change in the coming days and weeks. See you at the new place!

*
Ha! ↢

Miscellany № 96: EPA

Esteemed Norwegian typefoundry Mono­krom (who, of course, designed the fonts used here at Shady Characters), tweeted a while back about a Unicode character called the “Wiggly Exclamation Mark”. Here’s the relevant snippet of text:

Text describing the proposed Unicode "wiggle exclamation mark"
Text describing the proposed Unicode “wiggly exclamation mark”, tweeted by Monokrom and taken from Karl Pentzlin’s 2011 proposal.

I’d never come across this mark before, and some digging revealed that it came not from the Unicode standard itself but rather a proposal to add characters relating to the so-called “English Phonotypic Alphabet”, or EPA.1 The EPA, in turn, is an English spelling reform that was promoted during the 1840s by Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis. Needless to say, Ellis and Pitman failed to make much of a dent in English’s famously obtuse orthography.2 One need only compare the proposed spellings of words like “hwen” (when), “acsent” (accent) and “menʃun” (mention) with their current forms to see how well it all panned out.

Except that isn’t quite the full story. The EPA was not Pitman’s first venture into alternative English spelling models, and another of his endeavours had been considerably more successful. His name may be more familiar to you as the creator of Pitman’s “Stenographic Sound-Hand”, or, more simply, Pitman shorthand, one of the most widely-used English shorthand writing systems.3 Nor was the English Phonotypic Alphabet as abject a failure as it at first appeared. We may not use Pitman and Ellis’s reformed spellings today but the EPA’s descendant, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), is still used to lay out pronunciations in dictionaries and similar publications.4 Here are those same words rendered in the IPA: “wen” (when), “æk.sənt” (accent) and “men.ʃən” (mention). See the resemblance?

So, what of the “wiggly exclamation mark”? Back to the “Second Revised Proposal to encode characters for the English Phonotypic Alphabet (EPA) in the UCS”, the document from which the snippet above was taken. Its author, Karl Pentzlin, had discovered a number of novel punctuation marks associated with the EPA and described how they, along with the modified letterforms that formed the basis of Pitman and Ellis’s new alphabet, could be added to Unicode.

At first, Pitman and Ellis had not seemed to care much about punctuation. Their foundational texts, the Completion of the Phonotypic Alphabet and the Extension of the Phonotypic Alphabet, published respectively in the June and July of 1845, did not mention punctuation at all.5,6 But in January of 1848, in the pages of Pitman’s in-house Fonetic Jurnal,* an unattributed article described the system of punctuation that was to go with the new alphabet.7

Table of characters in the English Phonotypic Alphabet
Table of characters in the English Phonotypic Alphabet, taken from the January 1848 issue of Isaac Pitman’s Phonetic Journal. New punctuation marks, including the “smile”, are at bottom.

Helpfully, many punctuation marks retained their meaning in the EPA: the full stop, colon, semicolon, comma and hyphen all kept their existing appearances and functions. A new mark, the “elision”, was rendered as a high dot (˙) and took the place of the apostrophe, which was repurposed to indicate stressed syllables. Added to these, however, were a battery of more radical marks. To quote that 1848 article,

(⸮) The Query
This is placed before any words or clauses by which a question is asked.
(?) The Doubt
This is placed after any word or statement, concerning which the writer feels some doubt, or which he wishes to call in question. Observe the difference between the doubtful inquiry, “You came last night?” and the usual interrogation “⸮Did you come last night.”
(!) The Call
A mark of exclamation, or simple surprise. Doubled (!!), it indicates great astonishment.
(¡) The Sigh
A Mark of grief or sorrow: placed after a statement which gives the writer pain. Doubled (¡¡), it indicates great affliction.
([wiggly exclamation mark]) The Smile
A mark of mirth or pleasure: placed after a statement which gives the writer pleasure, or produces in him a feeling of amusement; and hence used in place of that expression in the speaker which in common intercourse is meant to indicate, “I was only in joke.” The doubled smile is a downright laugh.

(Some later publications inverted the “smile” mark to give a sarcastic or ironic inflection.1)

These new marks were quite a departure from the otherwise simple spelling reform of the EPA, and I wonder what drove Pitman and Ellis to add them to their new orthography. A rush of blood to the head, perhaps? A desire to remove even more of the ambiguity from printed English, where a ‘!’ can be happy, sad, excited, anxious, or portentous? In the end, their motivations may be less important than the fate of their marks — which was, if you haven’t already guessed, to be consigned to history along with the rest of the EPA. A sad and perhaps undeserved end, but hardly an unexpected one.

1.
Pentzlin, Karl. “L2/11-153:/Second/Revised/Proposal/to/Encode/Characters/for/the/English/Phonotypic/Alphabet/(EPA)/in/the/UCS”. Unicode Consortium, May 4, 2011.

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2.
Tarantelli, Valentina. “Voice Into Text: Case Studies in the History of Linguistic Transcription”. University of Sheffield, 2015.

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3.
Triggs, Tony D. “Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813–1897), Deviser of a System of Shorthand Writing”.

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4.
Ager, Simon. “International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)”. Omniglot.

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5.
Pitman, Isaac. “Completion of the Phonotypic Alphabet”. The Phonotypic Journal 4, no. 42 (June 1845): 105-119.

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6.
Pitman, Isaac. “Extension of the Phonotypic Alphabet”. The Phonotypic Journal 4, no. 43 (July 1845): 121-126.

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7.
“Symbols of the English Phonetic Printing Alphabet”. The Phonetic Journal, no. 1 (January 1848): 17-20.

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*
Sadly, this is not a faithful representation of the title of Pitman’s periodical. Pentzlin’s proposal to add EPA characters to Unicode was rejected, so it is not possible to render the title of the Fonetic Jurnal exactly as it was printed — the lower-case ‘o’ should have a small indentation at the bottom. ↢

Museum of London: a Shady Characters field trip

Apologies for the relaxed pace of posts here; I’ve been hard at work on the manuscript for Empire of the Sum, which is currently ping-ponging between New York and Birmingham as my editor helps knock it into shape. There isn’t much time left for writing anything else!

That said, I did manage a trip to London with my family this last weekend, which was a pleasant little diversion. We visited the Museum of London, which lives on a roundabout (or traffic circle, or island, depending on your local vernacular) at the southern edge of the Barbican Estate. This alone is noteworthy. The Barbican is an astonishing place, a Brutalist, 1960s vision of a future in which residents and visitors perambulate serenely from one tower block to the next via elevated walkways and manicured gardens. It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to hurry through the Barbican: if the arresting views don’t get slow you down, the mazelike layout will finish the job.

Built in 1976, the Museum of London is of a similar vintage and manages to cram a lot of material into its two floors. It’s an old-fashioned museum in a lot of ways, with few interactive exhibits and a liking for display cabinets and dense textual labels. But don’t let that put you off: the history of London is fascinating, the building itself is a pleasure to stroll through, and its out-of-the-way location means that it’s often quieter than heavy hitters such as the Natural History Museum and Science Museum. (For what it’s worth, the Museum of London also looks to be less dependent on problematic sponsors such as BP, Shell and Rio Tinto.)

Down on the museum’s lower floor was a cluster of exhibits that caught my eye: a Sumlock Anita calculator, an Apple II home computer, and the control console for a Lyons Electronic Office. I spent a lot of time with these three devices as I worked on Empire of the Sum, but the pandemic put paid to a lot of in-person research and it was a treat to finally see these machines in the metal. Each one of them played a pivotal role in the rise and fall of the pocket calculator.

Controls for the Lyons Electronic Office
Controls for the Lyons Electronic Office. (Image by the author, taken at the Museum of London.)

The Sumlock Anita and the Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO, were competitors at one remove during a critical period in the calculator’s history. Vacuum tube computers, such as the LEO (developed by a chain of tea shops, no less), threatened the livelihood of the mechanical adding and calculating machines that occupied many an office desk. As the largest British manufacturer of such things, London-based Sumlock was especially worried. Their response was the Anita of 1961, a desktop calculator about the size of a cash register whose keyboard mimicked those of Sumlock’s older mechanical models. It was the world’s first mass-produced electronic calculator, and it shook the complacent calculator industry out of its torpor. Within a few years, transistorised desktop calculators were the norm; a few years after that, and pocket calculators driven by integrated chips had arrived. The clunky, chunky Anita started it all.

Sumlock Anita calculator
Sumlock Anita calculator. (Image by the author, taken at the Museum of London.)

If the Anita was the starting gun for the electronic calculator race, the Apple II, released in 1977, was the bell for its last lap. Home computers, as with mainframe-style machines such as the LEO before them, were not direct competitors for the calculator, but the programs that ran on them were another matter. The Apple II’s killer app — the first-ever killer app, by most accounts — was a program called VisiCalc that simulated a paper accounting tool called a spreadsheet. VisiCalc was a runaway success, to the extent that many customers bought Apple IIs purely to be able to run it. For decades, the calculator industry had been building better mousetraps; VisiCalc was a mousetrap, bear trap, and hunting lodge rolled into one. The calculator’s days were numbered.

Apple II computer and disk drive
Apple II computer and disk drive. (Image by the author, taken at the Museum of London.)

There’s much more to the history of the calculator, of course, and to the Museum of London! I hope to tell the calculator’s story as well as I can in Empire of the Sum (I guess we’ll find out how well I did in summer 2023 or thereabouts) but in the meantime, if you can make it, the museum is an excellent place to visit. Highly recommended.