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

Amazon.com Price: $22.86 (as of 06/12/2019 04:59 PST- Details)

Categories: Alphabet, Arts and Photography, Books, Decorative Arts and Design, Design History and Criticism, Graphic Design, New, Used and Rental Textbooks, Reference, Specialty Boutique, Subjects, Typography, Words, Language and Grammar

Description
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Description

From ancient Greece to the Web―by the use of the Renaissance, Gutenberg, and Madison Avenue―Shady Characters exposes the name of the game history of punctuation.

A charming and indispensable tour of 2 thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a captivating trail around the parallel histories of language and typography.

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 Web, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of those enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and on a regular basis (&).

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 difficult to understand 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.

Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising within the writing life.

2-color; 75 illustrations

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

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