¶ Taking pride of place at the head of every new paragraph, the pilcrow had carved out a literal niche for itself at the heart of late medieval writing. Boldly inked by the rubricator, pilcrows grew ever more elaborate and time-consuming to add. Unfortunately the deadline is not a modern invention; occasionally, time would run out before the rubricator could complete his work and the white space carefully reserved for the pilcrow went undecorated. With the advent of the printing press, the volume of printed documents to be rubricated grew exponentially and it became increasingly difficult to attend to them all. The pilcrow became a ghost, and the indented paragraph was born in its stead.1
Coming soon: The Pilcrow, part 3
The third and final part of the story of the pilcrow is in the works. We’ll be covering the pilcrow’s place in modern typography and in particular how the controversial sculptor Eric Gill used it in his hand-printed book An Essay on Typography. Take a look at the first and second parts of the story to refresh your memory, and check back this Sunday for the final entry!
As always, thank you for all the comments and suggestions, and please keep them coming via Twitter, Facebook or Shady Characters itself.
The Pilcrow, part 2 of 3
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!