Shady Characters by Keith Houston, review 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. Though his selection feels slightly arbitrary, the stories he uncovers along the way are fascinating. Shady Characters takes in ancient Greek editors, medieval scribal practice, the invention of the printing press, the standardisation of punctuation brought about by the rise of the novel, the pernicious influence of the typewriter and the dawn of the "post-metal" (which is to say, digital) typographic age. Many of Houston's shady characters are implicated in the triumph of technology over design. The pilcrow, ¶, which originated as the letter C (for capitulum), and was used in medieval manuscripts to mark space for a section break, has become largely invisible. It was doomed by the invention of the printing press, Houston argues, when the addition of extra characters by hand became too time-consuming to be worthwhile. Now it haunts word-processing software only on the "show/hide formatting" button, which "turns otherwise invisible spaces and line breaks into dots and yet more pilcrows, lending the average computerised document a dignified medieval appearance." Other glyphs have become more rather than less familiar over time. One of the most engaging chapters in Shady Characters tells the story of the @ sign, or arobose (also known as the "elephant's trunk," "the snail," "the monkey's tail" and "the sleeping dog"). Originally a commercial mark signifying "at the rate of," the symbol became ubiquitous after an engineer named Roy Tomlinson used it to differentiate between users and their locations in the new email system he'd invented for Arpanet, an early progenitor of the internet. Like the arobose, the octothorpe (#) rose to prominence due to its association with a new technology, when a Bell Labs employee decided to place it on the handsets of redesigned telephone keypads. Later it migrated to Twitter, where it's used to tag trending topics. Houston is also interested in more obscure characters, the "cult punctuation marks" that are usually discussed only by typophiles. The manicule, or "bishop's fist" - a playful little hand inserted into manuscripts to signal interesting or contentious content - was originally a reader's mark. It survived the printing revolution but has since been largely overshadowed by more sober symbols. The "interrobang" is a combination of question and exclamation marks, which was invented by advertising executive Martin Speckter in 1962 to express a rhetorical combination of excitement and disbelief. It garnered some fame (perhaps because its inventor was an adman), and was included on a Remington typewriter and commended by typographers, or so the advertising bumf claimed, "for its ability to express the incredibility of modern life." Despite this, it never really caught on. Houston goes on to discuss the history of the hyphen, the dash and the inverted comma, and concludes with an account of the various "sarcasm marks" that have been proposed over the years to flag irony. Online, "irony accounts for eight per cent of" conversation, Houston writes, and more and more we reach for emoticons to signal the fact that we're not being quite straight with one another when we type. This is a self-defeating move. As the critic I A Richards pointed out: "If the quality of irony in a statement is such that it must be telegraphed to the reader, is it still ironic?" And what happens if an irony mark itself is used ironically? Unlike Eric Gill's seminal Essay on Typography, Houston's is not a polemical book. It's written in a jaunty tone, laced with geeky relish. He's not particularly interested in passing judgment, or in offering guidance on proper usage. The closest he comes to prescriptivism is in lamenting the dominance of the "hyphen minus," the diminutive catch-all mark included on typewriter keyboards, which eroded the subtle differences between the various distinct dashes that preceded it. "In print and online, the well-set dash is an endangered species," he writes. Other than that he's generally tolerant of creative reappropriations of his beloved characters, something that makes Shady Characters quite refreshing. You can't imagine Gill having much time for smileys;) Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities by Keith Houston 352pp, Particular, Telegraph Price £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99)