One caveat: this first round is for US residents only. There will be another round for US residents after US publication and two rounds for non-US residents closer to publication time in the rest of the world. To make sure you don’t miss those future contests, you might want to subscribe to the Shady Characters newsletter using the link at the bottom of the page.
The contest will close at noon UK time on Sunday 20th August 2023, so make sure you enter before then. After that I’ll pick two winners from the list of all unique entrants, and I’ll get in touch to arrange free postage of your prize. See below for terms and conditions, and good luck!
Update: The competition is now closed! I’ll announce the winners soon.
Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France. Narbonne is an old Roman town, once called Narbo Martius, that forms one point of a shallow triangle with the medieval walled city of Carcassonne and the bullfighting mecca of Béziers. It’s a nice little place; somewhere between a tourist trap and a working town, with plenty to see and do in and around the local area.
For me, the highlight was a visit to Narbo Via. This is a museum on the edge of town, sited rather incongruously beside a conference centre and a giant Carrefour supermarket, that lives in a restrained, thoughtful building designed by Foster+Partners. On the outside and the inside it is cool, quiet, and modern, with lots of concrete, wood, metal and marble on show. It felt like — and I can’t imagine this is accidental — a modern interpretation of an ancient Roman temple or senate house.
I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years and six-ish months. For reference, here’s the first ever miscellany post, published way back in November 2011. Amusingly, it is unnumbered. Who’d have thought I’d have needed more than a single post to tie up some loose ends?
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these posts as much as I’ve enjoyed putting them together, and so, with that said, on with the show and long may they continue.
In their paper, Stanisz et al find that the distances between consecutive punctuation marks follows the Weibull distribution — a curve sometimes used to model time between failures or mortality rates — and that all of the languages examined had similar distributions describing the occurrence and ordering of different marks. That’s an oversimplification (and, given I don’t have access to the paper itself, a necessary one) but it’s an interesting avenue of research nonetheless. Readers with institutional Elsevier subscriptions should feel free to add more in the comments.
Elsewhere, Steven Heller, esteemed design critic and man of impeccable taste,* recounts the story of the New York Times’ $600 full stop. I won’t spoil his short, sweet story, so head over to Print Mag to read the whole thing.
Lastly, Scientific American reports on the accession to the Unicode Standard of a new set of numerals. The so-called Kaktovik numerals were invented some thirty years ago by the Alaskan Inuit schoolchildren of the village of the same name, and they codified the counting scheme used in the spoken Iñupiaq language. What’s interesting here is that the Unicode Consortium is famously strict about admitting new characters to the Unicode standard, but the Kaktovik numerals represent a rare and happy success story — the creation and admission of a whole new set of numerals that both broadens the standard’s reach and goes some way to righting historical wrongs in the treatment of the Alaskan Inuit. Unicode doesn’t have exactly a perfect record when it comes to representing minority groups, so it’s gratifying to see the consortium doing the right thing here. More at Scientific American!
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:
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:
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 ‘$’.
The Spanish coat of arms, showing a shield surmounted by a crown and flanked by the pillars of Hercules. (Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
The roots of the dollar sign are disputed. The leading theory holds that ‘$’ 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.
Silver, Rollo G. “Typefounding As a Permanent Industry”. In Typefounding in America, 1787-1825, 3-30. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965.
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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