Miscellany – Page 20 – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 16

September 30, 2012

As eagle-eyed readers of the @shadychars Twitter feed will have noticed, September 24^th was National Punctuation Day. Billed as the “holiday that reminds America that a semicolon is not a surgical procedure”, this year’s event was accompanied by a competition, run by the New Yorker’s Questioningly blog, to design a new mark of punctuation by combining two existing marks. The competition is now closed, and though I won’t spoil the winner for you, I will say that I particularly appreciated @Majo_P’s “commarisk” (,*), used to connect a logically unsound conclusion to a premise, and Andrew Nahem’s “meh” mark (¥<), used to indicate a lack of enthusiasm for something. See more entries and the eventual winner here!

Miscellany № 15

September 16, 2012

A short entry today, but, I hope, a good one.

In the run-up to handing in the Shady Characters manuscript, I went through my notes one last time to check that I hadn’t missed anything. In doing so I came across a cryptic note about some of Richard Isbell’s original drawings for his font Americana, commissioned and sold by American Type Founders in honour of the USA’s impending bicentennial. I duly clicked on the accompanying link and was rewarded by an amazing set of Isbell’s drawings for the extra bold weight of this first interrobang-bearing font.

Miscellany № 14

September 2, 2012

The manuscript is delivered, ladies and gentlemen. Barring any drama when the W.W. Norton staff return from Labor Day weekend, another milestone in the production of Shady Characters has been reached. To the many people I’ve hounded in the past month about images, quotes or other details, please accept my apologies and my thanks. Also, thanks must go to you, the Shady Characters readership, for your patience. Sorry for the radio silence!

Miscellany № 13

July 29, 2012

After the New York Times’ article “Semicolons: a love story” mentioned here last time, Mary Norris of the New Yorker has weighed in with a rather more measured piece entitled “Semicolons; So Tricky”. Where do Shady Characters’ readers sit on this mark, I wonder? Is use of the semicolon a matter of taste or an essential part of writing?

Miscellany № 12

July 8, 2012

Emoticons are, it turns out, rather older than I had thought. Last month the photo blog Retronaut posted images of an 1881 issue of Puck magazine depicting proto-smileys constructed from parentheses, stops and other typographic marks, just like their modern counterparts.