Things have been frantic around here lately. Mostly, I’ve been busy reviewing the proofs of The Book, of which more soon, but I’ve also written a pair of articles for other publications, both of which were a lot of fun to address.
I’ll be on holiday this coming week, enjoying the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris with my wife Leigh (as she put it when she suggested the trip: “lycra is optional, the Louvre is not”), but here are a few punctuational links to tide you over until I’m back.
As I mentioned last time, I recently took part in a workshop on the subject of “punctuation in practice”. My presentation there was titled “Ghostwritten: the vanishing pilcrow”, and it traced the life of the paragraph mark from ancient marginal dash (—) to medieval capitulum (¢) to pilcrow (¶), as shown in the slide reproduced above, and finally to empty space, or paragraph indent ( ) — all things I’ve talked about here, and in the Shady Characters book, at some length.
At the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh on the city’s Blackford Hill, in the depths of its oldest building, is a locked, climate-controlled room. That room is a library, and it houses the world’s most important collection of antiquarian books on astronomy.
Christmas shopping getting you down? Me too, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of my list of things to find and buy. Here, then, are a few links of a punctuational kind to help take your mind off the next plunge into city-centre shopping madness. Enjoy!