Book launch competition: we have a winner

Image courtesy of Jason Booher.
Image courtesy of Jason Booher.

As I mentioned recently, I handed out copies of the Shady Characters quiz at the book launch party here in Edinburgh. I promised the attendees that one winner would receive a copy of the US edition of the book, and I’ve finally got round to tallying up the scores. Tom Pilcher and Chris Mackinnon both scored top marks, but random.org, my go-to source for numerical chaos, has selected Tom as the winner. Congratulations to Tom, commiserations to Chris, and thanks again to all who came to the launch and took part in the competition!

Publication week round-up

Shady Characters

has been on sale for over a week, and now that the furore has died down a little I thought I’d collect links to all the articles I wrote in support of the book. Some of these have already been featured here; others were posted on Twitter, Facebook and so on, and a few more are new. Without further ado, then, and in no particular order, here you are:

If I had to pick a favourite, it would have to be “The List: Keith Houston on four unusual punctuation marks”, published by the FT; it’s a short article, but that only made it more challenging — and rewarding — to write.

Shady Characters was also (favourably!) reviewed in a number of places:

And finally, I was interviewed for both The Atlantic Wire and the local newspaper for my home town, the East Fife Mail. I wonder, can anyone else say that?

Shady Characters, the quiz

The launch party for Shady Characters went swimmingly! The bar was packed with family and friends, both old and new; many books were signed, and much wine was drunk. My mum brought along a fountain pen that had once belonged to my grandfather, and it was an honour to be able to sign books with it at my first-ever book launch.

While at the launch I took the opportunity to pass out a quiz I wrote a while back to help Particular Books promote the UK edition of Shady Characters, and I thought I’d share it here too. Regular readers of the blog (and book!) will have the answers down pat, but if there are any you’re unsure about just hover your mouse above an answer to reveal whether it’s the right one or not. (On touch screen devices, tap the answers instead.) Some questions have more than one answer.

Enjoy, and post your scores here if you feel like bragging! Read more →

And the winners are…

…Paul Carvill (@paulcarvill) and John Stuart (@biostuart)! Congratulations to them both. Paul and John’s names were picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest.* Their copies of the UK edition of Shady Characters will be on their way very soon.

The response to this competition was huge — 143 entries! — and I really appreciate all the lovely comments and tweets you posted in order to take part. Commiserations if you did not win, but thanks again for entering!

*
In more detail: I arranged the names of all entrants in a text file, then used random.org to pick two numbers between 1 and the total number of lines in that file. ↢