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Shady characters : the secret life of punctuation, symbols, & other typographical marks / Keith Houston.

by Houston, Keith, 1977-

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W.W. Norton & Company, [2013]

Punctuation -- History.

Signs and symbols -- History.

Type and type-founding -- History.

Printing -- History.

Writing -- History.

9780393064421 (hc.)

0393064425 (hc.)

xi, 340 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-319) and index.

The pilcrow -- The interrobang -- The octothorpe -- The ampersand -- The @ symbol -- The asterisk and dagger -- The hyphen -- The dash -- The manicule -- Quotation marks -- Irony and sarcasm -- Irony in history -- Ironics -- Digital sarcasm.

"Revealing the secret history of punctuation, this tour of two thousand years of the written word, from ancient Greece to the Internet, explores the parallel histories of language and typography throughout the world and across time. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)--which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible--or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&). From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang and as divisive as the dash. Ancient Roman graffiti, Venetian trading shorthand, Cold War double agents, and Madison Avenue round out an ever more diverse set of episodes, characters, and artifacts"--Provided by publisher.

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