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

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

By Keith Houston

Typography aficionados (typographiles?) will enjoy this deep dive into the origins and usage of several punctuation marks, including the interrobang, the asterisk and dagger, the manicule, and more. It also includes a section on irony and sarcasm and how they may be rendered in text. Conspicuously absent is the semicolon—for its full biography, see Cecelia Watson's 2019 book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.

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