The interrobang is still enjoying its 50th birthday — it was, after all, published in the March-April edition of Type Talks — and as such I’m sure you’ll forgive me for pointing out one final article on the subject. Nora Maynard’s interview with Penny Speckter for The Millions is brilliant: Lynne Truss is set to rights, Mad Men rubber-stamped, and the Speckters’ dedicated ‘Bodoni apartment’ explained.
Turning away from the interrobang for the moment, Lauren of Superlinguo, a Melbourne-based language blog and radio feature, laments the prosaic naming of the @-symbol. I would have to agree: ‘commercial at’ doesn’t hold a candle to ‘rose’, ‘rollmop herring’ or ‘worm’, but Shady Characters readers have already weighed in on this subject and perhaps ‘atra’, ‘aterra’ or ‘astatine’ — my personal favourite because of the chemistry pun — will catch on.
Finally, the Daily Telegraph sponsors a short but engaging video on the production of books. The contrast between the relative automation of different parts of the process is surprising; printing and binding are briskly efficient in their use of well-oiled, cast-iron machinery while a hand-made and applied hardback cover brings everything together with a deft human touch.
As mentioned in Miscellany № 5, the interrobang is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of the occasion Amy Freeborn of The Freeborn Times has published an article on the subject which brings together information both from here and from Alex Jay’s excellent biography of its creator. Not only that, but no less an organisation than the BBC dropped a passing reference to the interrobang into the end of a recent news item on history of punctuation, driven, surely by the character’s ongoing birthday celebrations. It’s only a shame that they couldn’t have been more complimentary about it!
Ugmonk’s excellent aluminium ampersand. Yours for a mere $54.00. (Image courtesy of Ugmonk.)
The excellent aluminium ampersand on the left is a product of Ugmonk, Inc. (as mentioned recently by I Love Typography) and I must say that one of these would be winging its way to my letterbox already had I not recently made the jump from gainful employment to starving writer. My garret would be much improved by its presence.
Lastly, my friend Jeff Sanders writes with a link to a marketer’s (or possibly grammarian’s) nightmare. Pity the poor apostrophe. It is sadly ill-used.
Of late I’ve been doing some research for the upcoming Shady Characters book, and as such I’ve been investigating the histories of some characters other than those already covered here. In particular, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the hyphen, or ‘-’: this simple bar has, through its role in hyphenation and justification, exerted a stubbornly persistent influence on typesetting and printing ever since Gutenberg’s famed 42-line bible was published in the late 1450s. I will, of course, go into much more detail in the book, but if you’re interested in the subject of printing I’d heartily recommend John Man’s excellent, readable history of Gutenberg and his invention.
Also related to printing, and especially its venerable, hand-set form, Danny Cooke’s short but sweet video on the subject — named “Upside Down, Left to Right” for the appearance of typeset letters bound in their forme, ready to be printed — is more than worth a few minutes of your time. And, as a bonus, the pilcrow makes a guest appearance around 4:58.
The interrobang is fifty years old this year, as noted by Alex Jay of the blog Tenth Letter of the Alphabet, and in honour of this anniversary Alex delves into the life and times of its creator, Martin K. Speckter. Along with some contemporary newspaper articles reporting the character’s creation, Alex has unearthed some incredibleimages of the interrobang as drawn by Richard Isbell for inclusion in his Americana typeface, providing an intimate look at the character as it wound its way from conception to moveable type.
As you might have guessed from my articles on the pilcrow, I have rather a soft spot for this particular mark of punctuation. And though I wasn’t brave enough to emulate Eric Gill’s use of the pilcrow to demarcate paragraphs here on Shady Characters, I read with interest about the recent efforts of two separate web developers to civilise the unruly state of paragraphing on the web.
First, Nathan C. Ford writes at length about the online habit of separating paragraphs with blank lines, decrying the disconnected “islands of thought” that result from this practice. Although acknowledging this may be appropriate for certain forms of text — news stories, for example, where each paragraph is dedicated to a separate fact — Ford goes on to practise what he preaches, providing a bookmarklet to instantly convert blank-line paragraphs to the more traditional indented system.
Next, though, I read with glee a tweet by one Justin Stach, who, in reply to Ford’s article, says simply: “I couldn’t resist making a pilcrow version.” Instead of indenting paragraphs, Stach’s “Pilcrow It!” bookmarklet runs them together and separates them with a single, proud red pilcrow. It works brilliantly on the majority of pages at Shady Characters, and I encourage you to give it a try!
On the subject of Eric Gill, John Boardley of I Love Typographymentions an exhibition of Gill’s typography at Tama Art University in Tokyo. If that’s a little far afield for you, the Special Collections department of the Library of the University of Amsterdam is currently showing The printed book: a visual history, an exhibition “devoted to printers’ manuals, illuminating the printing process, and also to type specimens and writing masters’ copybooks, placing letterforms in a broader context.” Neither exhibition, unfortunately, is previewed in detail on their respective websites, but if you can make it, both look to be well worth a visit.
I came across the Twitter feed of a new, UK-based design agency recently, and I couldn’t let them go by without a mention: Interabang founders Adam Giles and Ian McLean have chosen a name close to my heart. I was able to chat with Adam over email about their reasoning, and he was good enough to let me post his words here:
As a graphic designer, the interrobang/interabang has always been on my radar as an unusual moment in the history of punctuation (and typography). When my partner Ian and I set up this company a little over a year ago we spent a long time thinking about a name that would mark us out as different whilst also hinting at the nature of what we do.
Superficially we love the sound of the word interabang, and we also suspected (correctly) it would be a great ice breaker when meeting people — we either get into a conversation about what an interabang is, or (on occasion) people know what one is, and enjoy telling us about how they came across one. This is partly why we don’t feature an actual interabang as part of our identity, as we wanted there to be a level of intrigue and ‘discovery’.
Conceptually we liked the idea of an interabang being two elements coming together to create something new (in the same way that my partner and I came together to start the company). It also suggests questions and answers, reminding us of the problem solving process we engage in as designers.
An ‘interabang’ iced onto a cake for design agency Interabang UK.
Also, Adam explained their decision to use the less common ‘interabang’, rather than the more usual ‘interrobang’, and summed up neatly the benefits of choosing such an unusual (to non-Shady Characters readers, at least!) word for their name:
Lastly, we chose the alternative spelling as we were concerned that people coming to the word cold, might find it harsh or aggressive (its only one letter away from having ‘terror’ in it!).
As a company name interabang has worked really well for us — if you read the article from design week linked below it’s the first thing mention[ed] about us. We’ve also found that people really engage with it — clients make up all sorts of names for us, and we’ve had a stream of home made/found interabang symbols sent to us. The most recent was iced onto a cake [ed: see above]!
The Design Week profile mentioned above can be found here, and you can read more about the agency at their website. Shady Characters has, of course, already covered the history of the interrobang/interabang at length, and who knows — perhaps some of Interabang’s clients will turn here to learn more about the agency’s namesake.
Also on Shady Characters’ radar is this post at xperimetre (the blog of Philadelphia’s Dark Potion Printing) which proposes a new mark of punctuation called the “affirmation point”, or “checkpoint”. Echoing Hervé Bazin’s pictographic “love point” and “acclamation point”, the checkpoint is oddly compelling. I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary as such, but to my eyes at least the checkpoint lends itself to sensible typographic rendering in a manner quite unlike that other newly created mark of punctuation, the much-maligned SarcMark.
That’s all for this year. I’d like to say thank you to all Shady Characters readers — the site would have been a quiet place without your comments, and the book wouldn’t have been possible at all. Have a great holiday, and see you all again in the new year!
