Shady Characters: The Secret Life Of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks, by Keith Houston

This is the sort of book where it is easy to know if you will like it or not. Are you fond of odd characters and their names and histories? Do you fantasize about making a unique sarcasm mark that somehow does not look like an upside-down exclamation mark and/or the double lightning bolt of the SS? Do you have an interest in knowing what the Library of Alexandria, early Hellenistic Christianity, the history of manuscripts and printing, as well as the development of computerized type have to do with the survival, revival, or obscurity of odd but interesting characters that exist on the margins of printing, sometimes both literally and figuratively? Are you looking for a bizarre set of words including the manicule (hand-shaped pointer towards notes), octothorpe (otherwise known as the # key), or the pilcrow that marks the beginning of a paragraph, among other dashes, ampersands, and other characters to enrich your vocabulary about words? Are you a future contestant of Jeopardy for which such arcane subject matter may be an entire category, or are you a word nerd in general? If so, this is a book that you enjoyed. As it happens to be a work that I enjoyed, full of personality as well as genuine human interest and a striking view at a small world that I have only viewed as an outsider, albeit a notable bibliophile, you can guess which of these categories I happen to belong to.

This book is about 250 pages long and it is divided into 11 chapters that discuss a bit more than dozen characters of dubious and clouded but interesting histories and the purposes for which these symbols have been used throughout history. The book begins with a preface as well as a short guide on how to read the book. After this the book contains chapters on various symbols. The first is the pilcrow, a notable figure that symbolizes the start of a paragraph and that comes through a roundabout history from the K for kaput in ancient Etruscan (1). The author then talks about the sad obscurity of the interrobang, a useful but neglected punctuation that demonstrates the difficulty of promoting new punctuation marks (more on this later) (2). The author then discusses the octothorpe # and its revival thanks to being added to the telephone (3). This is followed by a discussion of the ampersand & and its rivals for being symbols for the important concept of “and” and explains why it is called an ampersand as well (a slightly profane story involving bored students) (4). After this comes a discussion of the @ symbol and how it was plucked from obscurity to be the perfect symbol for e-mail addresses (5). Discussion of the asterisk and dagger symbols end up involving footnotes for Christian texts, especially the Bible (6), and discussions of the hyphen (-) and dash (–) end up involving more than half a dozen related symbols all of which have their own tangled and complex use and history (7, 8). The manicule (9) brings up the importance of readers to the area of characters (10), and shows how a character can lose its way by being overused while still being a lovely character in its own right worthy of being known better. The last chapter discusses the issue of irony and sarcasm and the various ways that people have sought to make a mark for irony or sarcasm that would explain to the unaware that something indeed is being meant ironically or sarcastically, despite the fact that this task largely defeats itself (11). The book then ends with an afterword, suggestions for further reading, acknowledgements, notes, illustration credits, and an index.

Though the book itself traffics in a fair amount of loving irony and a large amount of enjoyable stories about characters and their history, and the history of the people involved with them, the shady characters that are discussed here are of at least two types. One of the types is the textual characters of this beautifully printed book, full of glorious footnotes that point out just how rich a world the world of typesetting and characters happens to be. The other is the shady people often involved with these characters, shrouded in mystery and sometimes notoriety. The names and stories of these characters are odd and obscure, and because so few books are written about the subject, and so little research has been undertaken about key questions (What was the role of the manicule in the Doomsday Book, anyway? Where did the thorpe in octothorpe come form?), it is hard to separate fact from legend and to know the history and origin of some of the terms we use. Did you know, for example, that the & symbol we use today had its earliest origins in urban scrawl in Pompeii, and that it took a long time to overcome the prestige of a rival et symbol that had a far better pedigree? Do you care? I do, and I’m not sure that is something that everyone would be willing to admit. If you do care about these and other odd and obscure questions, though, this is a book worth reading, and if you like beautiful books full of odd stories, this is a book worth owning as well. My local community library is lucky enough to have it among its bookshelves, though.