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Curt Herzstark, its inventor, thinking it his only way out, designed the Curta to appease his captors — and, after the liberation of the notorious Buchenwald camp in which he was imprisoned, found his way to the tiny principality of Liechtenstein to see his blueprints put into production. Along these lines, the characters themselves, while not crossing the line into being humans in animal clothing, so to speak, strike a perfect balance between exhibiting relatable human traits while retaining their animal personas, so readers can’t mistake that this is an animal’s world rather than animals transplanted into a human world.
Although he is careful not to give away classified information, there are plenty of stories that were new to me. However, as the author Keith Houston discovered in the afterword, this book is really more of an exploration of the development of written language and its stylizing and the evolution of printing. Sure, it's a way of getting a lot of 'facts' down on a page - some of those facts might even be interesting - but you can do that in fiction too; oftentimes much better. The dust jacket is nicely designed with some embossing, but it may be easy to get dirty due to uncoated paper used. Shady Practices is a revealing analysis of the gendered political ecology brought about by conflicting local interests and changing developmental initiatives in a West African village.Read this, and you will understand about half the Auto-Correct settings in your word processing program!
Entertaining history of a variety of punctuation marks and how they developed and became standardised (not just eg the dash and exclamation, but also manicule, pilcrow, interrobang).More than a mere catalog of curious trivia, it’s an absolutely fascinating blend of history, design, sociology, and cultural poetics — highly recommended. książkę nie tylko o znakach ale tez o powstawaniu internetu, poczty elektronicznej, TeXa, bibliotece aleksandryjskiej, różnych wybitnych jednostkach swoich czasów, oczywiście historii książek i druku. Keith Houston is witty and his writing style is informative while engaging the reader in a journey into the nether regions of typography.
From the pilcrow ¶ to the ampersand, the entire cast of Shady Characters reflects the changes in written communication through the ages, charting how punctuation has adapted to each new technological innovation. I kept stopping to report captivating details (at least, I thought they were captivating) to the people around me. Founded a decade earlier on an excess of pluck and a surfeit of ambition, inventor Clive Sinclair’s company had matured from home-built transistor radios to stylish hi-fi gear. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). To my surprise, this engaging rabbit trail through history ended up being one of the best books I've read all year!
Houston has a knack for turning otherwise dry historical facts into a compelling narrative, picking out the thread of each character’s story while following it down all kinds of scenic side roads and intriguing back alleys. We see how the coming of mass produced documents written by hand, copied and recopied, and eventually printed with presses of moveable type caused some of these symbols to be eliminated or changed to accommodate progress. Depending on the reader’s age, the name “Hewlett-Packard” may evoke calculators, desktop computers or printers. Houston’s dry, wry style makes this an engaging read (well, as engaging as a book on punctuation can be). The novel also borrows from the classic structure, conventions, and plot twists of good, old fashioned detective fiction – despite the fact Vera Vixen, the lead character, is not a detective in the strict sense of the world.
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