Shady Characters at The New Yorker
I wrote a guest post for The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Read it here!
Miscellany № 37: welcome to :Düsseldorf
I must apologise for the radio silence this past weekend; my wife and I were visiting Düsseldorf in Germany for a few days of archaeological sightseeing, museum going, and tasting of regional beers. One thing caught my eye as soon as we arrived, as you can see above: the city’s new logo, designed by advertising agency BBDO, could be seen from the airport to the Altstadt. The Local reports that BBDO head Frank Loetze said: “We wanted an over-arching symbol which exudes the feeling of living in the city — the grinning D is concise and appealing. And we decided on red and white as they are the colours of the city.”1
Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation
Do you know Latin?
The Shady Characters manuscript is on the very cusp of completion, but eagle-eyed copy-editor Rachelle Mandik has noticed that I have inadvertently left a Latin book title untranslated in the chapter concerning the manicule (☞). The title is as follows:
Repetitio capituli: Omnis utriusque sexus; De poenitentiis et remissionibus1
Miscellany № 20: On Typewriters
Recently I was lucky enough to take a break from editing the Shady Characters manuscript with an entertaining trip to New York City to visit Brendan Curry, my editor, and Penny Speckter, to whom dedicated readers will require no introduction. (More on that in a week or two, I hope.) In amongst the various punctuation-related news items that popped up since I was away, however, one story in particular caught my eye: the last new typewriter to be manufactured in the UK came off the production line at the Brother factory in Wrexham, Wales, at the end of November this year.1 It is the end of an era, and one that bears a little attention.