The rise of the computer, and the hand-wringing that has accompanied the decline of handwriting, has made typographers of us all. What used to be a niche interest has gone mainstream. Writers have become interested not just in what words mean but in how they look on the page or screen. In 2010, Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, a book about the secret history of fonts, was a somewhat unlikely success. Now Keith Houston has written a book about what he calls typography’s “shady characters”: 10 more or less familiar punctuation marks, many of which we use unthinkingly every day.
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