Typographers, printers, and designers like to imagine themselves experts in their fields, and anyone who writes about typography may be assailed for slights and inaccuracies—real or imagined. Ask us which side of the Helvetica ja! vs. bah! divide we occupy, and you’ll hear a discourse as impassioned as any author’s thoughts on the demise of “whom” or the validity of the serial comma.

Keith Houston, a software writer, tills the unforgiving soil of type history via his blog, “Shady Characters.” His chatty posts about type and printing often yield a fresh typographical morsel or two, while his footnotes and cross-references can easily send a reader whirling into cyberspace on all sorts of unexpected tangents.^*

Houston digs a little deeper with Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks, expanding a recurrent motif of his blog: the often confusing histories of punctuation marks, and their appropriate typographic and literary/editorial context. This is no small undertaking, and Houston carries it off with a measure of breezy charm—and abundant footnotes and endnotes.

Conversational in tone, if occasionally discursive, Shady Characters explores the histories of characters as diverse as the now-inescapable octothorpe (#), the trusty dagger (†), and the ill-fated “SarcMark” (). Houston genially invites the reader to browse around, cross-referencing the essays for those who choose to read up on the asterisk before tackling the interrobang. No slave to the printed page, Houston usefully relates how various marks have survived