Compared to Rome’s traditional pagan religion, Christianity was altogether a different beast. Whereas paganism relied on oral tradition and its practices varied according to local custom, Christianity instead emphasised conformity and written scriptures.1 If Judaism had been the prototypical religion of the Book, Christianity embodied this ideal with an unprecedented vigour, possessing a symbiotic relationship with the written word which simultaneously drove the evolution of punctuation and benefited from a concrete, written dogma. After all, the Word of God had to be transmitted with as little ambiguity as possible.2 Read more
Coming soon: The Pilcrow, part 2
Part 2 of the story of the pilcrow is coming along nicely. Picking up from where part 1 left off, it’ll cover the influence of Christianity on the development of punctuation before moving onto the pilcrow itself. Here’s a somewhat tangential excerpt that I hope doesn’t give too much away:
In 312, on the eve of a battle which would decide the ruler of a united Roman Empire, the presumptive Emperor Constantine was reported to have witnessed a vision of a cross in the sky. If Constantine had been in any doubt as to the import of this symbol, it was accompanied by a helpful explanatory inscription, HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS (“BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER” — one might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capital letters when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lower case), and was followed that night by a dream in which God instructed him to march into battle bearing a replica crucifix.
Look out for The Pilcrow, part 2 this weekend!
In other news, Shady Characters gets brief but very welcome mentions from the New Yorker, I Love Typography and the Toronto National Post.
An aside
I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all of the tweets, blog posts and comments that have appeared since Shady Characters went live — I’m bowled over by the response! Thank you particularly to Christopher and Nicklas of Web Standardistas and Jean François Porchez for mentioning Shady Characters on their respective sites, to Dom Crayford for submitting it to Hacker News, and to Jon Tan and Mark Pilgrim for their tweets. I’ve read Mark and Jon’s writing in the past, so to be mentioned in their Twitter feeds is amazing.
Stay tuned for more on the pilcrow — the next entry should appear within the next week or two, if things go according to plan — and yes, for all of the people clamouring for it, the storied interrobang is next!
The Pilcrow, part 1 of 3
This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.) Read more
Introduction
Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — a friend recommended a book to me. The book was An Essay on Typography1, written in 1931 by Eric Gill, one of England’s most famous modern typographers. Although it was both diminutive in size and short on actual instruction (Gill preferred polemic to practical advice), Essay was a joy to read, full of philosophical asides and painstakingly hand-cut illustrations. Most of all, though, my interest was piqued by the unusual character resembling a reversed capital ‘P’ — ‘¶’ — which peppered the text at apparently random intervals. Read more