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.
Conrad Altmann, proprietor of Altmannhaus Creative, has been reinterpreting the visual forms of some familiar shady characters. My interest was piqued by his recently-posted @-symbol (shown below); where the usual typographic approach is to start with the “single storey” ‘a’ commonly found in italic typefaces, Conrad has instead used the “double storey” ‘a’ more usually associated with roman script. I like it!
The interrobang is still enjoying its 50th birthday — it was, after all, published in the March-April edition of Type Talks — and as such I’m sure you’ll forgive me for pointing out one final article on the subject. Nora Maynard’s interview with Penny Speckter for The Millions is brilliant: Lynne Truss is set to rights, Mad Men rubber-stamped, and the Speckters’ dedicated ‘Bodoni apartment’ explained.
As mentioned in Miscellany № 5, the interrobang is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of the occasion Amy Freeborn of The Freeborn Times has published an article on the subject which brings together information both from here and from Alex Jay’s excellent biography of its creator. Not only that, but no less an organisation than the BBC dropped a passing reference to the interrobang into the end of a recent news item on history of punctuation, driven, surely by the character’s ongoing birthday celebrations. It’s only a shame that they couldn’t have been more complimentary about it!
Of late I’ve been doing some research for the upcoming Shady Characters book, and as such I’ve been investigating the histories of some characters other than those already covered here. In particular, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the hyphen, or ‘-’: this simple bar has, through its role in hyphenation and justification, exerted a stubbornly persistent influence on typesetting and printing ever since Gutenberg’s famed 42-line bible was published in the late 1450s. I will, of course, go into much more detail in the book, but if you’re interested in the subject of printing I’d heartily recommend John Man’s excellent, readable history of Gutenberg and his invention.