typewriter – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 32

June 9, 2013

Some housekeeping this week, with lots of links from the past few weeks to get through. As always, if you have something you’d like to see featured here, please drop me a line with the details.

Just before my honeymoon, I was lucky enough to be interviewed for an article in Fast Company’s Co.Design blog. John Brownlee’s article, The Unlikely Evolution Of The @ Symbol, focusing on the symbol’s use as a signifier of digital identity, is now online. Thanks are in order for John for selecting the most coherent parts of my answers!

Miscellany № 20: On Typewriters

December 10, 2012

Recently I was lucky enough to take a break from editing the Shady Characters manuscript with an entertaining trip to New York City to visit Brendan Curry, my editor, and Penny Speckter, to whom dedicated readers will require no introduction. (More on that in a week or two, I hope.) In amongst the various punctuation-related news items that popped up since I was away, however, one story in particular caught my eye: the last new typewriter to be manufactured in the UK came off the production line at the Brother factory in Wrexham, Wales, at the end of November this year.1 It is the end of an era, and one that bears a little attention.