Shady Characters – The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks

Product Information

There are almost too many clues indicating Stasia is the killer, leading her to suspect someone is setting Stasia up. I kept stopping to report captivating details (at least, I thought they were captivating) to the people around me. The village of Shady Hollow is rocked by a murder, and reporter Vera Vixen is determined to find out the truth.

Shady Practices is a revealing analysis of the gendered political ecology brought about by conflicting local interests and changing developmental initiatives in a West African village. The first real books appeared in the ancient Greek city of Pergamon, located in what is now western Turkey.

Keith Houston is witty and his writing style is informative while engaging the reader in a journey into the nether regions of typography. This is considered a “cozy” mystery, but considering there is murder and even attempted murder, there can be darker moments. The rest of the book follows much the same pattern, with trips through the birth of textual criticism in the Great Library of Alexandria, the lasting influence of Roman weights and measures, the invention of the printing press and the birth of typography, the invention of the novel, the standardization of keyboards and telephone keypads, and the beginnings of the internet. Thus, if a Sinclair Executive had ever met its demise in the pocket of a notable personage, it most likely happened in England, not Moscow — yet without much proof either way, there remains the tantalising possibility that there is more to the story. This isn’t to say that the stories aren’t interesting, just that I found them less compelling than the stories of the punctuation marks that survived.

Well, readability (comprehension was not tested) would certainly drop when these factors are involved. I recently received a review copy of Keith Houston’s new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks , based on his excellent blog of the same name. Despite having pioneered the integrated circuit, the Cal Tech’s chips were so complex that the company could not reliably produce them en masse. 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.

Things are always in flux, and with the advent of cheap and widespread computing power there is no reason to think we aren't on the verge of a symbol revolution.