"Might make you look at books… in an entirely new way."

"Make no mistake: this is a book of secrets. With zeal and rigor, Keith Houston cracks open the &, the #, the † and more—all the little matryoshka dolls of meaning that make writing work. Inside, we meet novelists, publishers, scholars and scribes; we range from ancient Greeks to hashtagged tweets; and we see the weird and wonderful foundations of the most successful technology of all time."

"Fascinating."

"An absolutely fascinating blend of history, design, sociology, and cultural poetics—highly recommended."

"Funny, surprising, and, of course, geeky."

"Houston…is a tireless researcher and an amiable teacher."

"If Eats, Shoots & Leaves whetted your appetite on the subject of punctuation, then you have a treat in store. Shady Characters is an authoritative, witty, and fascinating tour of the history and rationale behind such lesser known marks as the ampersand, manicule, the pilcrow, and the interrobang. Keith Houston also explains the octothorpe—otherwise known as the hashtag—and and my final comment on his book is #awesome."

"A pleasurable contribution to type history, particularly for readers who haven’t considered the ampersand in any detail."

"I'm a sucker for this stuff. The @ is called a chiocciola (snail) in Italian! The & was once taught as a letter of the alphabet! The manicule has been with us for a millenium! Thank you,  Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history. "

A mostly amusing, informative history of punctuation. Several years ago, Houston, a computer programmer, came down with a bad case of pilcrow-infatuation. Obsessed with the archaic glyph used to mark the beginnings of paragraphs, he laboriously traced its storied past, encompassing "the ancient Greeks, the coming of Christianity, Charlemagne, medieval writing, and England's greatest twentieth-century typographer." One of these things is not like the other, and readers who do not share Houston's malady will find it difficult to understand the intensity of his interest in punctuation. Spurred on by a chance encounter with the widow of the creator of the interrobang ("a hybrid question mark/exclamation point"), the author broadened his focus. From the first visual markers denoting word boundaries in Greek and Roman texts to the development of computerized kerning and letter-scaling systems ("[d]enizens of the typographic world were not amused," fearing that automation threatened the purity of their craft), Houston explores the roles a variety of punctuation marks have played in the popular imagination. The forgotten manicule, the modest dash and the ampersand all make appearances, as do intriguing characters from millennia past: Scrolls at the library of Alexandria featured the "dotted diple"--"used to mark passages where the scholar differed with the reading of other critics." The author also keenly laments perceived punctuational slights--e.g., the world's longest footnote, a 165-page aside cataloging Britain's Roman walls, "is, sadly, introduced by the letter u rather than an asterisk or dagger." The book is often engrossing, but the author can never quite decide if he is aiming for a substantive book on the history of written expression or for a compendium of errata. Scores of prints from ancient and medieval manuscripts suggest the former; the final chapter, an exhaustive anthology of proposals for marking irony and sarcasm, many on deleted personal webpages, the latter. An unusual triumph of the human ability to find exaltation in the mundane.