2013 non-fiction; Houston looks into the history and evolution of a
variety of punctuation marks.
Which could be summarised in many cases as "first recorded by a
librarian of Alexandria as part of the breaking-up of scriptio
continua; expanded in usage by the monasteries; wrenched around by
the advent of movable type; squashed into ASCII, or ignored; restored
by Unicode". I wonder whether a more chronological treatment, with
side notes on the individual marks under consideration, might have
worked better; this mark-by-mark arrangement leads to quite a bit of
repetition and back-reference. But of course the details are more
interesting.
The pilcrow comes first, and its section therefore has to do much of
the historical heavy lifting; it's really more about the development
of the concept of the paragraph-level separation.
The interrobang is blatantly modern, having been invented by an
advertising-man in 1962. (And un-forgotten largely because Houston
found the inventor's widow; it seems frankly superfluous, if briefly
amusing.)
The octothorpe can be traced fairly cleanly from librum to Bell
Labs, though Houston doesn't notice that "#" for "lb" has fallen out
of use outside North America (perhaps along with the lb itself, though
I'm not sure it was ever common in the UK at least).
The ampersand deals also with the (more interesting) Tironian et
(U+204A), still surviving in Irish Gaelic, and with the development of
differing italic and roman lettering styles.
The @ symbol starts with Ray Tomlinson at BBN, then jumps back to
see why that symbol was on his keyboard in the first place.
The asterisk and dagger also divagate into footnotes; incidentally,
there are both chapter-end- and book-end-notes here, the former being
interesting side points, the latter being actual references.
The hyphen and The dash (separate chapters) start to lose me: it
feels like punctuation as gatekeeping, since if you use this
almost-indistinguishable mark rather than that one you are branded
as Not Properly Literate.
The manicule is the pointing finger, killed off when a book became a
mass-produced item rather than something which an individual rich
reader would have made to their own order and thus feel at liberty to
annotate.
Quotation marks might have done better to examine why some people
apparently feel that they should be used for emphasis; but mostly it's
about how a special mark for the Word of God gradually became used for
anyone's actual words.
Irony and sarcasm seems like the most pointless chapter: from the
very first attempts, this has foundered on the impossibility of
telling whether an irony-mark was itself being used ironically.
Houston does do a good job of tracing the idea of a backward-slanting
face for ironic usage back to Tom Driberg rather than the more
partisan claims for Mencken or Levin.
It's a shame that the more "normal" marks are omitted from this
review; perhaps Houston felt that Parkes' Pause and Effect had done
the job already. This book is fun, but it feels in the end like a
feast of trivia rather than a grand argument or progression; it's
pop-typography, a subspecies of pop-history, rather than a serious
examination.
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