Miscellany № 2

Grammar.net

’s competition for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 has finally, absolutely and completely closed, and Shady Characters has parlayed 8th place into an actual title: “The Best Grammar Blog of 2011 for Punctuation Tips”. Thanks are in order one last time to all those who voted for Shady Characters!

You may remember that Boyd Adamson asked about the origin of the Apple Mac’s ‘⌘’ character in a comment on The Octothorpe, part 2. I wasn’t able to shed a great deal of light on it, but Shady Characters reader Jason Black has since pointed out an excellent article on Susan Kare, the graphic designer who introduced the ‘⌘’ symbol along with much of the rest of the Mac’s now-iconic visual language. Read it here: The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face.

Lastly, if you haven’t already seen it, Jonathan Hoefler’s (of Hoefler & Frere-Jones) excellent presentation of the nuances of web fonts is well worth a look for typophiles and technologists alike. Enjoy!

Miscellany

After a relaxing little interlude, it’s time for me to start on the Shady Characters book in earnest. While I do so, though, some readers have shared links that might be of interest.

On Twitter, Jason Black pointed out Benjamin Milde’s novel site Shapecatcher.com. Draw a letter, mark of punctuation or other symbol with your mouse and Shapecatcher will attempt to identify it from a set of about 10,000 Unicode characters. It’s Shazam for letterforms, and it made a decent fist of my hastily-drawn interrobang.

Over on Google+, Przemek Sakrajda mentions the British Library’s new exhibition on Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, running from 11th November to 13th March next year. I plan to visit if at all possible, but if you (or I) can’t make it, the BL’s Digitised Manuscripts and Gutenberg Bible sites both have plenty of medieval punctuation and typography to appreciate.

And speaking of Google+, Shady Characters finally has a dedicated G+ page. If you’re a Google+ user, add us to a circle to receive updates of new posts!

Big news for Shady Characters

I couldn’t have imagined this when I started posting here back in January, but Shady Characters has a book deal. I am still battling with disbelief.

Laurie Abkemeier of DeFiore and Company got in touch back in March; we put together a book proposal over the next few months, and just last week Laurie emailed me to let me know that it had been picked up by the publishing house W.W. Norton. I’ll be working on the book over the next year or so with Brendan Curry, one of Norton’s non-fiction editors, and it will appear in shops — well, honestly, I have no idea when it’ll be ready!

What does this mean for the Shady Characters website?

First, I’m going to take a break from writing longer articles for a little while. Though I love writing the articles here, it’s a time-consuming business and (perhaps selfishly) I’m looking forward to a little time away from these longer articles.

Second, and more importantly, in no way is the site “finished” or closed for business! The site will continue to be updated, both with news of the book and with new articles. Not only that, I’ll still be watching the comments with as much enthusiasm as ever: some of the most widely-discussed articles here have come from comments and emails sent in by Shady Characters readers, and I’m sure there are many more to come.

Finally, some thanks are due. Writing for the site has been eye-opening, in the best of senses; my own knowledge of punctuation, grammar and typography is dwarfed by that of the site’s readership, and to pretend otherwise would be to do you all a disservice. Thank you for reading, commenting, sending in your thoughts and corrections, and for supporting the site on Facebook and Twitter.

Also, I must thank my friend Jeff Sanders, who has patiently read over each article draft (often on Saturday night or Sunday morning as I scrambled to get it finished in time) to make corrections and suggestions that have improved each one immensely.

Thank you all!

If you have questions, suggestions, or any other feedback, please leave a comment below or get in touch via the Contact page.

Oh, and there’s still time to vote on your favourite Grammar Blog of the Year — perhaps a last-minute effort could propel Shady Characters to the top of the list¡