My screen is always sprinkled with tiny dots floating in midair between words and pilcrows hanging off of the edges of paragraphs. w czasie przeplatające się wątki i osnowy poszczególnych znaków, pozwala dostrzec współtworzoną przez nie tkaninę pisma jako takiego.

The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony–until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case. I note that each of these transitions (and transitions from letter press to offset press printing) all were criticized for their initial lack of quality compared to the out-going technology. For example, Vera mentions Heidegger, an owl, to a rabbit who still shivers with fear involuntarily.As she stirs up the still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and the folks in Shady Hollow learn that some of their neighbours are lying, while others are downright dangerous. Change is afoot in Shady Hollow, with an unusually tense election shaping up between long-serving Chief of Police Theodore Meade and Vera’s beau, Deputy Orville Braun.

Each chapter covers a different punctuation mark or typographical symbol, starting with the pilcrow (also known as the paragraph mark, ¶). You can stretch a longer scale around the circumference of a circle than you can fit across its diameter, and a longer scale means more accurate measurements and more accurate multiplications. Heidegger is still a “night owl” with great night vision and is considered very wise by the local community, well educated with a wealth of knowledge that Vera uses on a couple of occasions.One distance plus another distance is a third, and all three can be read off a pair of logarithmic scales lined up next to each other. It started life as the “Cal Tech”, a prototype calculator designed by Texas Instruments as a means to sell microchips to the average person on the street. One small flaw in the book is the author's apparent acceptance of the myth (based on "study after study") that ragged-right text is easier to read than "obsessively justified" text present in "almost all modern books. Entertaining history of a variety of punctuation marks and how they developed and became standardised (not just eg the dash and exclamation, but also manicule, pilcrow, interrobang).

Oh, I forgot to mention that I had my attention drawn to the narrow gutterstrip by my cousin who is a book binder. There were apparently a whole bunch of different dash lengths used for different effects that have now all been reduced to the simple -. This only adds to the plot’s sundry twists and turns as each chapter ends on a high note that compels readers to keep going. A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography.Officially known as the octothorpe, it apparently derives originally from the Latin libra (scales) pondo (to weigh). When she reaches the garage a few seconds later, she find the door of the Century open, a shadowy figure running off into the night, and Henry unconscious on the ground. It is published in the UK by Penguin Books as Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and Other Typographical Curiosities.

I love the way how the subject marks in each chapter are printed in red, which helps to read the book without disruption. developments that, at times, took centuries (some innovations came much more quickly, as circumstances and needs changed).It's absolutely packed with intriguing, historical facts about all the dots and squiggles that are sprinkled on every written page in the English language. Punctuation may be invisible, but it isn't meaningless, and understanding its history makes us better users of the tools of language that make us human. When everything was written down there was little to no uniformity in terms of symbols and their meanings.