It’s publication (and punctuation) day!

Shady Characters in Barnes & Noble, NYC. Picture courtesy of Tricia Halling.
Shady Characters in Barnes & Noble, NYC. Picture courtesy of Tricia Halling.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks

is now available to order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Indiebound and Powell’s.* If you’re still on the fence as to whether to buy the book, you can now take a look at a few sample pages over at W. W. Norton’s account on Medium. Perhaps Judith Abbate’s excellent typography or Jason Booher’s vibrant cover will sway you!

This is a quite a day for me, and and there are lots of people to thank for helping to make it happen. Thank you all for reading and commenting on Shady Characters over the years; thank you to my agent, Laurie Abkemeier, and to Brendan Curry et al at W. W. Norton, for shepherding me through the processes of writing and publication; thank you to Jeff Sanders for early encouragement and editing; and most of all, thank you to my lovely wife Leigh for being so supportive. Not coincidentally, today is National Punctuation Day, so in honour of that esteemed holiday, I’ll finish by saying: may your clauses be crisp and your punctuation judicious.

*
Stay strong, UK readers; your time will come. It will come on Thursday, in fact. ↢

Win one of two UK copies of Shady Characters!

Matthew Young’s jacket for Particular Books, featuring cunningly matched front and back covers. Sneaky!
Matthew Young’s jacket for Particular Books, featuring cunningly matched front and back covers. Sneaky!

If you missed the chance to enter Goodreads’ giveaway of the American edition of Shady Characters, now’s your chance to win a copy of the UK edition, complete with Matthew Young’s clever wrap-around jacket. I have two copies to give away, and I’ll happily post them to the two winners wherever they are in the world. To enter the competition, just do one of the following:

  • leave a comment on this post, making sure to supply a valid email address so that I can contact you in the event that you win, or
  • reply to, retweet, or mark as favourite the tweet announcing this contest, making sure to follow @shadychars so that I can send you a direct message in the event that you win. (Please don’t create multiple accounts or repeatedly reply to the message — Twitter may ban you as a result. One reply is fine!)

I’ll make a list of all unique commenters and tweeters in two weeks’ time and pick two names at random as the winners. The contest will close at noon GMT on Sunday 29th September 2013, so make sure you enter before then. Good luck!

Update: the competition is now closed. Thanks to all who entered!

Updated contact details

This is a very quick note to say that I’ve added some new details to the Contact page. Also, I learned today that the contact form on that page has been misbehaving; certain messages were lost before they reached my inbox. If you’ve tried to send me a message but did not receive a reply, please accept my apologies! From now on, all messages should reach me in short order — and if not, please drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.