Miscellany – Page 3 – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 93: a fistful of manicules

February 6, 2022

Underware, the Dutch/Finnish type foundry comprising Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki, is one that gets special characters. Bas’s ironieteken (), or irony mark, was one of the first characters I wrote about here. They’ve also done some interesting work towards a “Latin plus” character set — a collection of the more than 450 accented and non-accented characters needed to typeset the hundreds of languages, common and otherwise, that use the roman alphabet. Now, they’ve added what they call a “manicule specimen” to this body of work. This warrants some explanation.

Miscellany № 92: a lightly festive miscellany

December 5, 2021

Work continues apace on the new book, but here are a few links I couldn’t let go before the holidays are upon us.

First is this amusing and well-crafted video exploration of where the comma should go in the first line of the song God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. Very clever, and very well executed. Kudos to its maker, Ramses the Pigeon.

Miscellany № 91: interrobang archaeology

August 16, 2021

Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it? Here are a few somewhat recent stories of a typographic or emojinal (?) bent that Shady Characters readers may enjoy.

If you recall, the interrobang came into being back in 1962 and was immortalised just a few years later in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface of 1967. As the first interrobang to take its place in a fully-fledged typeface, Isbell’s “open” version has a reasonable claim to being the canonical form of the character. The holotype of the interrobang, so to speak.

Miscellany № 90: 🌀🪐☆✻, or, the grawlix

April 29, 2021

This sentence:

I really #\*$@% want to visit a museum.

combines a truthful statement with what is known as a grawlix — a pile of non-alphanumeric characters intended to represent (and censor) a profanity.

I’ve been meaning to write about grawlixes for what is probably a few years now, but which, thanks to the ongoing coronavirus catastrophe, feels more like a few decades. The word (though not the typographical practice) was coined by the American newspaper cartoonist Mort Walker, whose bona fides derive from his creation, in 1950, of a comic strip called Beetle Bailey that he continued to produce until his death in 2018. (A 1954 spin-off, Hi and Lois, is carried on by his sons.)1 Walker introduced the grawlix and its relatives to the world at large in a 1975 book called Backstage at the Strips that, in turn, made reference to an earlier “presentation” concerning the grawlix:2,3

Miscellany № 89: 2020, year of the asterisk

November 8, 2020

The asterisk is old. Really old. Granted, it is not 5,000 years old, as Robert Bringhurst claims in the otherwise impeccable Elements of Typographic Style1 (Bringhurst confuses it with a star-like cuneiform mark that represents “deity” or “heaven”2), but it has more than two millennia under its belt nonetheless. I go into greater detail in the Shady Characters book, but the abridged version of the asterisk’s origin story goes something like this.