Things are busy here at Shady Characters and I’m afraid there’s no time for a proper entry this weekend. What I can offer you instead is the brief history of the # and the @ that I put together recently for the Penguin Books blog — have a read, and feel free to drop by afterwards with any comments you might have!
Well, hello there.
You all know the handsome fellow that adorns the cover of this book, don’t you? This is the ironieteken, the brainchild of type designer Bas Jacobs, and it is used to terminate an ironic statement.1 Specifically, it is intended to punctuate verbal irony, where a speaker or writer says one thing but means another. It is, to my mind, the most visually convincing irony mark to date — but for the purposes of today’s short post, it is merely one of the many suitors who have tried and failed to win irony’s hand in marriage.