Miscellany № 23

A short entry today, I’m afraid. I’m in the middle of responding to the copy-edited Shady Characters manuscript (you’ll be glad to hear that there are relatively few punctuation-related corrections), so things will have to be necessarily brief!

A couple of weeks ago, Rudi Seitz wrote to let me know that the Shady Characters comment form was broken. He was right; it was, but it is no longer. Please take a moment to test it out, and let me know via the Contact page if you have any problems. More interesting than my technical tribulations, however, was the rest of Rudi’s email, in which he explained:

On another note, I’ve just today undertaken my own series of experiments with the sarcasm mark, unfortunately ending in frustration:
http://rudiseitz.com/2013/01/02/irony-mark/

Also, I have a proposal for distinguishing ironic questions from ironic statements by giving them separate marks:
http://rudiseitz.com/2013/01/02/punctuating-ironic-questions/

Have I reinvented the wheel here?

As an avowed interrobang booster, I might have to lean in the direction of “yes”; I suspect that Martin K. Speckter’s mark already fills that niche. Even so, Rudi’s experiments in punctuation are a bracing reminder that the technological constraints that stymied many early attempts at creating new marks have now all but disappeared: we can design, disseminate and discuss new marks in a way unthinkable only a few decades ago. It begs the question: where are all the new marks of punctuation?

I must say thanks to Rudi for his email, and do hop over to his site for more on punctuation, music, photography, and a host of other topics.

Cover artwork for Tusk's Interrobang EP. (Image courtesy of Tusk.)
Cover artwork for Tusk’s Interrobang EP. (Image courtesy of Tusk.)

As promised in a previous post, I got in touch with Tusk, a Newcastle band about to release a new EP entitled Interrobang, to ask about their choice of name. Tusk bassist Andy Cutts wrote back to explain:

We think it’s a underused and underrated piece of interesting punctuation and is due a comeback. We like how it asks a question with exclamation – we’d like to think the music will do similar.

So there you are! Thanks to Andy for fielding my questions.

Miscellany № 22: An Audience with Penny Speckter

Two Americana interrobangs – likely bold or extra bold, and at a large size for display purposes – gifted by Penny Speckter. Background is the cover of Agent, Action, and Reason. (Shoddy photography by the author.)
Two Americana interrobangs – likely bold or extra bold, and at a large size for display purposes – gifted by Penny Speckter. Background is the cover of Agent, Action, and Reason.* (Shoddy photography by the author.)

As mentioned previously, a couple of months ago my fiancée and I visited New York City. Not only had I never visited the city, but I was also eager to meet some of the people who have been involved, in one way or another, with the Shady Characters book.

The day after we arrived I had lunch with Brendan Curry, my editor, at a restaurant round the corner from W. W. Norton’s Fifth Avenue offices. It was great to meet him in person, and after learning a little more about those parts of the publishing process still to come, I’m more excited than ever about seeing the book in print. (Sadly, my imagined three-Martini lunch1 did not come to pass. Perhaps I should move into fiction.) Laurie, my agent, was unable to meet us – for now she remains but a voice on Skype and a reliably canny email correspondent – but later in the week we did manage to organise a meeting with a third and most vital contributor to the book: Penny Speckter. Penny is, of course, the widow of interrobang inventor Martin Speckter; we’ve been corresponding since I first started looking into unusual marks of punctuation back in 2009, and she has been a great source of help and encouragement. After a few emails to confirm arrangements we met at her apartment for drinks and then dinner at an Italian restaurant a short walk away.

I was a little anxious at the prospect of meeting someone with whom I had only ever communicated via email, but I needn’t have worried. It was a fantastic evening!

Penny’s living room was lined with shelves bearing books on printing, with tiny hand presses arrayed among them.† After a slightly surreal introduction (“Hello! I’m Keith, from the Internet”) we proceeded to chat for hours – so long, in fact, that we were late for dinner by a full hour. The miniature hand presses, Penny explained, came from Martin’s collection of printing presses; for years the Speckters had rented out the apartment opposite their own to house this collection of printing paraphernalia, naming it “the Bodoni apartment” in honour of the Italian Renaissance printer. Though I had read about this in a 2012 interview,2 what I hadn’t known was that the Speckters had once emplaced a mighty Columbian press there,3 its ton-and-a-half bulk placed carefully across beams in the floor, and had played host to a number of luminaries of twentieth century printing such as Hermann Zapf4 – Hermann Zapf! – and Steve Saxe.5

Penny insists that the secret to her longevity is a Scotch and soda every evening, but I suspect it’s more likely to be her sheer, irrepressible force of personality. She has travelled widely (her first two trips abroad were to China and Nepal respectively), and at 93 she is the secretary of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen,6 a venerable New York institution that trains, supports and promotes the interests of skilled technical workers. Though she grumbled about the challenges of helping run the Society, she clearly has an enormous sense of civic duty and an enthusiasm for carrying it out.

We eventually made it to the restaurant, where we ate well and were turfed out gently as they closed for the night. Penny wouldn’t let us leave without some keepsakes, and we came away with a slip-cased copy of Martin’s book Disquisition on the Composing Stick7 and, to my continuing astonishment, a pair of the original interrobang sorts first cast for American Type Founders in 1967.‡ Though I’ve been writing about the interrobang for years, until that moment it had remained a sort of conceptual artefact, a grand idea never quite given form. And yet there in my hand was the evidence that Martin K. Speckter had somehow willed a new character into physical being – perhaps the last one we’re likely to see in this post-letterpress era. It was quite a revelation.

We thanked Penny profusely and walked the ten blocks or so back to the hotel. I can’t wait to visit again.

1.
“The Boredom of Boozeless Business”. The Economist.

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2.
Maynard, Nora. “You Call That a Punctuation Mark?! The Interrobang Celebrates Its 50th Birthday”. The Millions, March 13, 2012.

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3.
Knopp, Justin. “The Highly Ornamented Columbian Press”.

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4.
“Hermann Zapf : 1968”. Type Directors Club, 2013.

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5.
“Stephen O. Saxe”. Cooper Union, January 6, 2013.

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6.
“Board of Governors”. Generalsociety.Org, January 6, 2013.

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7.
Speckter, Martin K. “The Neglected Tool”. In Disquisition on the Composing Stick, 1-24. New York: Typophiles, 1971.

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*
I mentioned Agent, Action, and Reason once before on Shady Characters; sadly, having received it in the mail, I discover that it bears no information about its cover designer. ↢
†
Like the Adana I learned to use at Smail’s printing works, though much smaller. ↢
‡
Penny’s own gold interrobang pin was cast from just such a sort. ↢

Miscellany № 21

Mental Floss recently published a primer on the many and varied uses of the em (—) and en dashes (–), including a mention of my personal favourite, the “compound adjective hyphen”. This is the case where a compound term such as “Pulitzer Prize” is joined to another term not with a hyphen but instead an assertive en dash to yield, for instance, “Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist”. And if your interest is piqued by Mental Floss’s brief treatment of the usage of the dash, then hopefully the chapter on its history in the upcoming Shady Characters book will be worth waiting for!

Moving away from punctuation for a moment, I very much enjoyed Ralf Hermann’s article on “Typographic Myth Busting: What’s a Ligature, Anyway?”. Ligatures – simply put, two or more letters rendered as a single combined character, though Ralf can educate you further on the finer points of the definition – are one of those typographic flourishes that bring the page to life, and yet are often so subtle as to be virtually undetectable. Ralf also delves into the tricky history of the peculiarly German long s–short s ligature (ſs), or eszett (ß). It’s a beautiful and enlightening article.

The interrobang continues to crop up in unexpected cases, if in name only: Tusk, a band from Newcastle, are planning to release an EP entitled Interrobang early next year. As you might expect, I have already asked them how they got the idea, and I await their answer with bated breath.

Lastly, Gawker reports on a quite magnificent attempt to reform political language in the USA. Max Read writes that a petition to “replace the period symbol with the cool sunglasses emoticon to foster a much chiller discourse in the United States” gained all of nine signatures before being removed by White House moderators.

The “cool sunglasses emoticon”, lest we forget, looks like this: 😎; I, for one, cannot see why this noble effort had to be so cruelly hushed up by The Man.

With that, it’s time for me to sign off for the year. Thank you all for continuing to read and comment – without you, there would be no Shady Characters book or blog! – and I hope you’ll keep coming back for more. Enjoy the holidays, have a great Hogmanay, and Shady Characters will be back in the New Year!

Miscellany № 20: On Typewriters

Recently I was lucky enough to take a break from editing the Shady Characters manuscript with an entertaining trip to New York City to visit Brendan Curry, my editor, and Penny Speckter, to whom dedicated readers will require no introduction. (More on that in a week or two, I hope.) In amongst the various punctuation-related news items that popped up since I was away, however, one story in particular caught my eye: the last new typewriter to be manufactured in the UK came off the production line at the Brother factory in Wrexham, Wales, at the end of November this year.1 It is the end of an era, and one that bears a little attention.

The typewriter is one of those disruptive innovations that have arrived periodically to shake up written communication: the unified Carolingian alphabet of the middle ages; Gutenberg’s moveable type of the 1450s; the automated typesetting of fin de siècle Linotype and Monotype machines, and of course the modern Internet, have all, like the typewriter, irrevocably changed the way we write. In the typewriter’s case, however, has that change been for better or for worse? Its demise has inspires mixed feelings in me.*

On the positive side, there’s something reassuringly straightforward about hitting a key and seeing a letter printed right before your eyes, and I appreciate a good, typewriter-inspired monospaced typeface as much as the next coder.† For all the nostalgia bound up in the memory of the typewriter, though, it has a darker side. During the century for which it remained the writing implement of choice, those office workers and writers who tapped away ceaselessly at their keyboards were shackled by the typewriters every bit as much as they were emancipated by it.

First, and most apposite to Shady Characters, is the havoc wreaked by the “Great Typewriter Squeeze”, a term coined by writer and blogger J.L. Bell to describe the decimation of punctuation marks caused by the new device.2 Early typists were hamstrung by the paltry selection of symbols available on their typewriters: in addition to an uppercase alphabet and the numbers 2–9, the two-row keyboard on Christopher Latham Sholes’ 1867 prototype bore only ; $ – . , ? and / keys,3 while Sholes’ 1878 QWERTY model added only an apostrophe and a colon.4 Typists could not draw upon the utility of the ampersand, asterisk or octothorpe, nor could they list items @ a unit price or inject emotion with a judicious exclamation mark! (Even a parenthesised aside was out of the question.)

For the most part, we still struggle with the legacy of the typewriter’s unthinking war on punctuation: though marks like the manicule (☞) and pilcrow (¶) can be got at with a combination of keyboard gymnastics and an esoteric knowledge of Unicode code points, for practical purposes we are still confined to the hundred-odd characters made trivially available to us on our laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Second is the typewriter’s social impact. Though it was ostensibly “a tool of female emancipation, offering women a respectable line of work in offices”, the typewriter instead became a visible reminder of an impenetrable glass ceiling. As Samira Ahmed wrote for the Guardian:5

[W]hen the British civil service took over operating telegraph and postal offices in the 1870s, the official in charge, Frank Scudamore, sought out women clerks for their typing speed and dexterity. But crucially, Scudamore said the wages: “which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class.” Women would spell and type better, raise the tone of the office, then marry and leave without requiring pensions.

Even when the interrobang (‽) arrived on Remington typewriter keyboards in the late 1960s, at least one newspaper editor still saw the world in Scudamore’s terms. The headline for the Kansas City Kansan’s coverage of this momentous typographic event was “Look Girls, a New Key on Typewriter”.6

None of this will stop me trawling eBay for a pristine IBM Selectric, or dissuade me from wondering if a typewriter is a viable text-input device in the 21st century,7 but it is certainly food for thought. During its heyday the typewriter too was mightier than the sword, and it was double-edged.

1.
“UK’s ’last typewriter’ Produced”. BBC, 2012.

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2.
Bell, J L. “Dash It All!”.

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3.
Weller, C. E. “Home of First Typewriter”. In The Early History of the Typewriter, 20-21.

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4.
Sholes, Christopher Latham. Improvement in Type-Writing Machines. U.S. Patent 207,559.

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5.
Ahmed, Samira. “Typing – it’s Complicated”. The Guardian.

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6.
Oakley, Don. “Look, Girls, a New Key on Typewriter”. The Kansas City Kansan.

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7.
Lowry, Cheryl. “Strikethru”.

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*
“Demise” is perhaps a bit strong; one American company named Swintec will still sell you a new typewriter, and doubtless there are others. ↢
†
As an exercise for the reader, right-click this page and hit “view source”, and see the computing world as programmers the world over have done for decades! ↢

Miscellany № 19

Shady Characters

is in print at last! Well, in a sense. David Březina of Rosetta Type, who specialize in multi-script typography, approached me a little while ago to ask about including some snippets of text from Shady Characters in their first type specimen, and I was happy to agree. The specimen arrived in the post a few days ago, and so here we are:

Rosetta type specimen no. 1, complete with text from Shady Characters
Rosetta type specimen no. 1, complete with text from Shady Characters. (Dreadful photography is mine; elegant type layout is Rosetta’s.)

It’s no Catiline Oration, but I’m still pleased to have been able to help. Thanks to David for providing me with a copy; I think it looks great, and you can buy your own copy here for the very reasonable price of €4.

With respect to the real Shady Characters manuscript, I’m currently in the process of responding to Brendan Curry’s first round of edits. I must apologise if this leads to posts here becoming a little erratic for a while — bear with me, and hopefully the end result will be worth your patience.

In other news, Eye Magazine reports on the opening of the “Pencil to Pixel” exhibition in London, open from today, the 19th of November, until Friday 23rd. It examines the history of the Monotype Corporation over the past century, and frankly, it looks amazing. Last week I was lucky enough to get a quick tour of the Type Archive (the charity which inherited much of Monotype’s machinery and responsibilities when the company went bankrupt in 1992) at the invitation of Nick Gill of Hand & Eye Letterpress, though I’m now kicking myself that I wasn’t able to postpone my visit until this week. If you’re in or near London, you really should get along to this exhibition!

Also this month, the octothorpe’s starring role as the Twitter ‘hashtag’ gets some scrutiny from Julia Turner of the New York Times. Her article “#InPraiseOfTheHashtag” delves into the semantics and fashions surrounding the use of the device, and concludes with the welcome observation that “the pound sign [is] flexing its muscles”.