Miscellany № 17

Manicule at Kings Cross station
A retro-appearing manicule points the way to the new entrance to Kings Cross station. (Photo by author.)

I visited London this weekend, continuing my niche campaign to explore the world of computer-to-Monotype interfaces. (If none of this makes any sense, take a look at my earlier post about the last working Monotype caster in Scotland.) Having seen Harry McIntosh’s system first-hand in Edinburgh, this time round I prevailed upon Phil Abel and Nick Gill of London’s Hand & Eye Letterpress to show me the system installed at their own workshop, of which much more in a future post.

On the way to catch the train home, I came across the billboard-sized manicule shown above, pointing the way to the new entrance at King’s Cross; this centuries-old mark is clearly in rude health. Not only that, but this larger than-life example takes a very clear (and quite correct) stand with regards to the King(’)s Cross apostrophe controversy: for now at least, the possessive apostrophe is in the ascendant.

Now, though, on with the show ☞

Unusual marks of punctuation got some much-needed PR a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Adrienne Crezo of Mental Floss magazine. The contents of Adrienne’s list of “13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using” will be not unfamiliar to readers of Shady Characters — the interrobang, SarcMark, irony mark all get mentions — but nonetheless, a number of other sites have picked it up and run with it, including The Week and Neatorama. Is a renaissance in the offing for unusual punctuation?

Having looked into the life and times of the humble ‘@’ key in fairly comprehensive detail, I enjoyed the New York Times’ short history of the ESC, or ‘escape’, key. It may not have the epic sweep of the @-symbol’s journey from Renaissance Spain to the birth of the Internet, but the ESC is surely as prevalent, if not used quite so regularly, as ‘@’. No sooner did I wonder if anyone has attempted a history of vestigial and endangered computer keys than I found a 2003 article at the Straight Dope taking a game stab at such a thing.

And, lastly, Shady Characters cropped up again in the Guardian’s Crossword Blog. A very pleasant surprise!

Miscellany № 16

As eagle-eyed readers of the @shadychars Twitter feed will have noticed, September 24th was National Punctuation Day. Billed as the “holiday that reminds America that a semicolon is not a surgical procedure”, this year’s event was accompanied by a competition, run by the New Yorker’s Questioningly blog, to design a new mark of punctuation by combining two existing marks. The competition is now closed, and though I won’t spoil the winner for you, I will say that I particularly appreciated @Majo_P’s “commarisk” (,*), used to connect a logically unsound conclusion to a premise, and Andrew Nahem’s “meh” mark (¥<), used to indicate a lack of enthusiasm for something. See more entries and the eventual winner here!

Oddly enough, of all the marks that have featured on Shady Characters, the only one that I can remember which fits the New Yorker’s bill is Choz Cunningham’s bipartite irony mark, or “snark” (.~). Do you double up any marks in this way?

I was intrigued (though admittedly not surprised) to read that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has been quantitatively determined to contain only a single exclamation mark:

‘Now!’ he said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body.1

This insight comes from Jeff Umbro of Quartz where, in another article penned in honour of National Punctuation Day, he investigates the relative frequency of exclamation points as employed in a number of major works. Hemingway’s Old Man is least exclamatory, fanfic-sensation-made-good Fifty Shades of Grey manages 299, while Zadie Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty surely approaches a 1:1 ratio of exclamation marks to page count with no fewer than 439.

Having just turned to Microsoft Word to check, I can now reveal that the Shady Characters manuscript contains exactly 41 exclamation marks. It should be arriving back from its initial edit any day now — I will report back with updated statistics as soon as it does so. I’m sure you’ll be on tenterhooks!

And, last but not least, the interrobang still continues to make waves at the grand old age of 50, selected as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day for September 26th.

1.
Hemingway, Ernest, and Herman Finkelstein Collection Library of Congress. The Old Man and the Sea. Scribner, 1952.

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Miscellany № 15

A short entry today, but, I hope, a good one.

In the run-up to handing in the Shady Characters manuscript, I went through my notes one last time to check that I hadn’t missed anything. In doing so I came across a cryptic note about some of Richard Isbell’s original drawings for his font Americana, commissioned and sold by American Type Founders in honour of the USA’s impending bicentennial. I duly clicked on the accompanying link and was rewarded by an amazing set of Isbell’s drawings for the extra bold weight of this first interrobang-bearing font.

The ship has sailed on including the image in the book, unfortunately, but its loss is our gain: from the collection of Fritz Klinke of NA Graphics, Silverton, Colorado,1 here is the last of the interrobangs drawn by the man who first shepherded them into print:

Designed for Richard Isbell's Americana
Designs for the extra bold weight of Richard Isbell’s Americana. (Image courtesy of Fritz Klinke on Flickr.)

Fritz acquired the image (and others like it, which you can see at his Flickr set of Isbell’s work) through his company, which in turn had purchased them at ATF’s 1993 bankruptcy auction.2 The fabric of the drawings themselves afford a glimpse into the pre-PC world of graphic design; as Fritz describes alongside the image:

Isbell used [photo]stats of the Bold version and cut them apart, expanding each character to the extra bold size and infilled the space with black India ink. Each character was then touched up with white and India Black where needed.3

And, via email:

All the marks on the scan are where Isbell was working the ink in his pen and similar marks occur on most of his other work. This artwork was shot on a camera and then an engraving pattern was made from the negative for use on the [pantographic] Benton engraving machine to produce a matrix for casting metal type.2

Americana Extra Bold was not only the final variant of that particular typeface, but also the the last hot metal typeface released by the once-mighty ATF. Given the rush from hot metal to the “cold type” of optical typesetting devices, the interrobang you see above may well have been the last ever to have been cut and cast in metal. You can read more about Isbell, Americana and the ATF’s slow demise elsewhere on Shady Characters.

My thanks go to Fritz Klinke for his permission to reproduce this fantastic image!

Coinciding neatly with the reappearance of the sci-fi drama Doctor Who on UK television screens, one-time Who script editor and novelist Andrew Cartmel recently wrote a short blog post bidding “Farewell My Lovely… Pilcrow”. Having used the pilcrow extensively in the past, Andrew confronts the difficulties in using the mark in its traditional role as a paragraph divider, concluding that “since I did a big publicity push for my new novel […] the last thing I wanted was a less-readable blog”.4 Do you agree? Is the pilcrow beyond saving as a common-or-garden mark of punctuation?

1.
Klinke, Fritz. “Fritz Klinke”. Briar Press, November 2004.

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2.
Klinke, Fritz. “Personal Correspondence”. Keith Houston, 2012.

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3.
Klinke, Fritz. “Richard Isbell’s Americana”.

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4.
Cartmel, Andrew. “Farewell My Lovely. Pilcrow”.

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Miscellany № 14

The manuscript is delivered, ladies and gentlemen. Barring any drama when the W.W. Norton staff return from Labor Day weekend, another milestone in the production of Shady Characters has been reached. To the many people I’ve hounded in the past month about images, quotes or other details, please accept my apologies and my thanks. Also, thanks must go to you, the Shady Characters readership, for your patience. Sorry for the radio silence!

Ben Yagoda, English teacher at the University of Delaware and instigator of the recent “logical punctuation” brouhaha, seems to be making a career as a punctuational agent provocateur. Turning his attention to the “Weimar-level exclamation inflation” particular to online communication, his latest missive for the New York Times makes passing reference to the interrobang and concludes that “QECs”, or “question-exclamation combos” (?! and !?), are now making their presence felt in print. Have any Shady Characters readers come across these devolved interrobangs in print?

Jen Doll of the Atlantic Wire has documented the “Imagined Lives of Punctuation Marks”* in a series of hilarious biographical sketches. Though the octothorpe and @-symbol do not warrant individual treatment, Doll does grant their street gang to a brief bio:

The Symbol for an Obscenity. !@#$!@$#!@ will tell you off just as soon as to look at you, but he’s fun to have around at parties and when truckers are giving you the finger on the highway, as well as on the off-chance you get your pinky caught in a door. Never met a bar brawl he didn’t like. Borderline sociopath, this @!*%$?-er owns a chihuahua.

The octothorpe does get a mention over at c|net, where Eric Mack laments the apparent fashion for prefixing a spoken exclamation with the word “hashtag” — for instance, “hashtag are you kidding me?”. I have never encountered this in person (I’m fairly sure my eyes will start out of their sockets if I ever have that privilege), but Mack evidently has done and implores his readers to use “pound” instead. Commenter md611, however, hits upon the correct solution to the problem, suggesting that:

[W]e could start saying “octothorpe”. That would be much easier to say and gesture.

I couldn’t agree more.

*
While reading Doll’s piece I came across a link to an article in Smithsonian magazine discussing the “The Accidental History of the @ Symbol”. Am I the only one to feel a little déjà vu when reading the latter article? ↢

Miscellany № 13

After the New York Times’ article “Semicolons: a love story” mentioned here last time, Mary Norris of the New Yorker has weighed in with a rather more measured piece entitled “Semicolons; So Tricky”. Where do Shady Characters’ readers sit on this mark, I wonder? Is use of the semicolon a matter of taste or an essential part of writing?

Also mentioned here recently was Conrad Altmann’s site Glyphaday. Conrad has recently moved his focus from individual characters to the glyph-by-glyph creation of the entire alphabet. It’s a great opportunity to see a new typeface being crafted piece by piece, and there are still some tidbits (such as this assertive asterisk) to be had for punctuation-philes.

The long s, or ‘ſ’, isn’t exactly a mark of punctuation, though I think it still more than qualifies as a Shady Character. It will be making a guest appearance in the book, but until then Andrew West’s exhaustive article “The Long and the Short of the Letter S” is well worth a look. That’s all for now; the 1st September deadline for handing in the Shady Characters manuscript is looming ever larger, so I have to cut things a little short. Wish me luck!