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

Product Information

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. In reading this book, there were moments when the sound of Houston's ego echoed with every keystroke. If you like typography, writing, text, or just reading a great book, you should absolutely get this one. As such, the discerning slide rule enthusiast appreciates the accuracy of the circular slide rule as much as the portability of the rectangular version. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Mental Floss, BBC Culture, and on Time.

We’re looking at the Hewlett-Packard HP-35, a scientific calculator that today looks quite unremarkable — and yet which, at the time, was revelatory. As you might expect, Shady Characters has images scattered across the text, all with helpful, manicule directed, captions underneath! Sold at Macy’s and advertised in Esquire, the HP-35 had an appeal far beyond mathematicians and scientists, and the company could barely keep up with demand.This copy received for free courtesy of Goodreads Firstreads program, which in no way influenced this review. Curt Herzstark, its inventor, thinking it his only way out, designed the Curta to appease his captors — and, after the liberation of the notorious Buchenwald camp in which he was imprisoned, found his way to the tiny principality of Liechtenstein to see his blueprints put into production. I note that I supervised a book-oriented typesetting service in San Francisco (doing work for major publishers) during the transition from dedicated phototypesetting machines to "desk top publishing. Houston tells the history of these symbols in a very economical way, not falling down any academic rabbit holes. 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.

Find out in this upbeat picture book that teaches kids to speak their minds and stand up for what they believe in. Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life.Herzstark’s tenacity in the face of one of the great atrocities of our time, and the ingenuity of the calculator that resulted, are equally worthy of note. Digging a little deeper, Vera and Lenore discover that the deceased was involved in a recent excavation at the site, and very unpopular with their colleagues. If you want to know the difference between the purpose of the many kinds of dashes and the hyphen, question how quotation marks arose, are curious about the manicule's past, want to learn the difference in uses for the Maltese cross versus the dagger, or wonder what's behind the pilcrow, the diple and the guillemet, this is only book needed.