Pulp, Pilcrows and Interrobangs Andrew Robinson Savours a Pair of Lively Studies on Paper and Punctuation

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TECHNOLOGY Pulp, pilcrows and interrobangs Andrew Robinson savours a pair of lively studies on paper and punctuation.

he paperless society is about as 2001 attacks. A blood-stained sheet of com- plausible as the paperless bath- mon bond found at ground level was scrawled room”, wrote Jesse Shera, a pioneer with the words: “84th floor west office 12 peo- of “information T technology in libraries, in ple trapped”. Ten years later, DNA testing of 1982. Nicholas Basbanes approvingly quotes the blood identified the writer. His widow this remark near the end of On Paper. His tells Basbanes that this sheet “belongs to my MAREK ULIASZ/ALAMY edifying, if bloated, history of paper — from daughters. It’s their legacy from their father.” manuscripts, books, newspapers, passports Enlivening and amplifying our com- and currency notes to stationery and ori- muniqués are the signs and symbols that gami, packaging, cigarettes and toilet typography blogger Houston unravels paper — has also convinced me that, in his first book, Shady Characters. The despite digitization, Shera was right. e-mail staple @ merits an entire chap- The stuff is convenient, portable and ter; Houston also examines the dagger cheap: On Paper has been published, (†), the ampersand (&), the hyphen after all, as both an e-book and a and quotation marks, as well as more deckle-edged hardback. obscure signs such as the pilcrow (¶) Typography, of course, enables most and the pictographic ‘manicule’ (a small paper-based and digital communica- hand with a pointing finger, once common tion. In Shady Characters, Keith Houston as a textual highlighter but later relegated to celebrates the origins and development of the likes of Monty Python sketches). He even typographical symbols, particularly the punc- delves into the ‘interrobang’, a fusion of the tuation marks that give shape, rhythm and question and exclamation marks invented by sense to the written sentence. These books an advertising executive, Martin Spekter, in offer much insight into the centuries of inven- the 1960s — which never really caught on. tion that have gone into creating the norms On Paper: The Everything of Its Houston’s title refers to the mystery of Two-Thousand-Year History with which we unthinkingly consume and how these “typographic conundrums” — as NICHOLAS A. BASBANES communicate vast amounts of information. Knopf: 2013. he calls them — have been endowed with Basbanes begins with a visit to the paper so much meaning. Consider the hash sign, makers of remote, mountainous, southwest- Shady Characters: The Secret Life now much used in Twitter ‘hashtags’. It can ern China, whose ranks are rapidly thinning. of Punctuation, Symbols and Other denote a number (5), weight (5) or check- Tradition has it that a Chinese court eunuch, Typographical Marks mate in chess; indicate a place to insert a Cai Lun, invented papermaking in AD 105, KEITH HOUSTON space in proofreading; stand in for the sharp but the process — pulping the cellulose fibres W. W. Norton: 2013. symbol in musical notation; or indicate, in of rags — was probably pioneered several many computer-programming languages, centuries earlier. (The Egyptian manufacture With the rise of mass literacy at the end of the that the rest of the line is a comment and of papyrus long predates paper, but involves Victorian era, “pulp fiction” soon followed. not a part of the program. The sign probably lamination rather than pulping. Confusingly, As Basbanes discusses, paper also became arose from the English abbreviation of the the word ‘paper’ is derived from the Latin physically useful in wars. Gun cartridges Latin word libra, or ‘scales’, as ‘lb’ (meaning papyrus.) The technology then travelled were made of paper from the fourteenth cen- a pound in weight). Scribes initially wrote eastwards to Korea and Japan, and westwards tury; the word ‘cartridge’ is probably derived ‘lb’ with a horizontal stroke through the two along the Silk Road through Central Asia, via from cartouche, which means ‘roll of paper’ ascenders to indicate that it was a contrac- the Arabs, to Europe. In both directions, Bud- in French. In the Second World War, the tion; hasty writing eventually transformed dhist monks were the first to use the material Japanese even made paper-balloon bombs of that into the hash sign. An example of such a to record sacred texts. The world’s earliest about 10 metres in diameter, each constructed scribble by Isaac Newton is one of the book’s complete survival of a dated printed book from 600 sheets of handmade mulberry paper many intriguing illustrations. is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, published (kozo) glued together and filled with hydro- Houston brings considerable wit and in 868, discovered a century ago in a cave at gen gas. From late 1944 until April 1945, some occasional erudition to the 5,000-year-old Dunhuang, western China, on the Silk Road. 9,000 were launched across the Pacific on the enigma of how we attempt to communicate It is now in the British Library in London. jet streams. An estimated 1,000 reached the our thoughts through visible signs. Like One country after another adopted paper, United States, but the sole casualties were a Basbanes’ doughty history, Shady Charac- from Spain in 1056 and Germany in 1391 woman and five children in Oregon. ters might make you look at books, or even (not long before Johannes Gutenberg began The intimate relationship between paper this journal — in print or online — in an printing) to North America in 1690 and Aus- and script, and its dominance as a mode of entirely new way. ■ tralia in 1818. From the mid-nineteenth cen- communication — at least until the past 15 tury, paper made from wood pulp became a years or so — underpin On Paper. Basbanes Andrew Robinson is author of The Story reality and, in 1873, The New York Times led memorably describes, for instance, the bliz- of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and the conversion of nearly every US newspa- zard of office paper that emanated from New Pictograms. per from rag paper to wood-pulp newsprint. 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