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