Skip to content
✕

Shady Characters uses cookies to anonymously record visitor numbers.

Shady Characters

The secret life of punctuation

  • Home
  • Contents
  • Books
  • Elsewhere
  • About
  • Contact

Shady Characters is miscellany, books, and more from Keith Houston. Here you’ll find information technologies of the unorthodox kind: from emoji to unusual marks of punctuation; from codices to calculators; and everything in between.

Now available to pre-order, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. Learn more

Calculator of the day: the slide rule

August 18, 2023

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US this coming Tuesday, the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d start a series of posts about a few of my favourite calculators.

Read more →

Part of a series on Calculator of the day news calculator, slide rule 10 Comments

You are viewing a series of posts about Calculator of the day.

Read more about these and other calculators in Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, available now.

Posts navigation

Newer
Cover for "Face with Tears of Joy", showing the face with tears of joy emoji throughout emoji history
Face with Tears of Joy paperback. (W. W. Norton, 2025.)

Sex! Conflict! International standards bodies! The story of emoji is far more interesting than it has any right to be. Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji will explore where the world’s newest language came from, how it works, and where it is going. It will not help you master emoji — only a tween could do that, and they will be too busy texting — but it _will_ provide an indispensable guide to the most vibrant part of modern language.

Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is available for pre-order, to be published in July 2025 by W. W. Norton.

    Buy at Norton
    Buy at Amazon.com
    Buy at Bookshop.org
    Buy at Waterstones
The sun rises behind a pocket calculator, whose display reads "07734"
Empire of the Sum hardcover. (W. W. Norton, 2023.)

An entertaining, informative story about a technology that defined an era.

Kirkus Reviews

To describe a calculator as “a symphony of solenoids and switches” (that would be an early, discarded model of what would become the Casio 14-A, which went on the market in 1975 for $1,347) may not be erotica, but it is good writing — and these days, the latter is rather more rare.

Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times
    Buy at Norton
    Buy at Amazon.com
    Buy at Barnes & Noble
    Buy at Bookshop.org
    Buy at Waterstones
Paperback cover of "The Book", showing the title on a cream band against a dark green background.
The Book paperback. (W. W. Norton, 2025.)

Erudite, playful, and illuminating…a splendid, challenging mixture of information and fun.

Kirkus Reviews

Hundreds of books about books have been published during the past century…I will not claim that this one is the very best of all time. Yet The Book is possibly the best of our time.

Steven Heller, Eye Magazine

Buy at Amazon
Buy at Barnes & Noble
Buy at Waterstones

Shady Characters paperback (W. W. Norton, 2014).
Shady Characters paperback (W. W. Norton, 2014).

Punctuation is not a mere ornament or a curiosity — it is essential, and we need to know about it. Keith Houston’s history is entertaining and readable.

Ian Sansom, The Guardian

Scholarly, highly readable and, on some deeper level, slightly deranged.

Marcus Berkmann, The Spectator

Buy at Amazon
Buy at Barnes & Noble
Buy at Waterstones

☞
  • Home
  • Contents
  • Books
  • Elsewhere
  • About
  • Contact
  • Bluesky
  • Mastodon
  • Facebook
  • RSS

© Keith Houston 2010–2025 · Colophon