Reddit reviews Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
We found 5 Reddit comments about Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Orders are despatched from our UK warehouse next working day.
I can't give suggestions on hand-lettering books yet as the few I have read weren't good...so I'm trying to find better ones. But check out Louise Fili and Jessica Hische for inspiration and of course Paula Scher and Sagmeister.
There are many other books so I welcome others to chime in and add their suggestions.
The "per se"/"by itself" is meant to signify that it's a character that is also, by itself, a word, such as "A" and "I". So you can say and write "A" and "I" whether you're referring to the word or the character by itself.
But you couldn't do that with the ampersand. The word "and" could be spoken out loud, or written down as the three characters a, n, and d. The "&" is spoken as "and," but written as the single character "&."
Since the character "&" was considered part of the alphabet that was taught to children, to distinguish it from the three character word "and" they said, "and, per se, and," to mean "the word 'and' represented by a single character."
Source: from what I remember reading in Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
(I hope what I wrote is coherent.)
related: I read a book on the history of punctuation and it was rather interesting.
link: http://www.amazon.com/Shady-Characters-Punctuation-Symbols-Typographical/dp/0393064425
I got Shady Characters for Christmas and they have a lovely section about the octothorpe. I don't know if this is the full version from the book, but there's some info about it on their blog.
Octothorpe Part 1
Octothorpe Part 2
Link for the lazy