Keith Houston

@shadycharacters

Keith Houston's blog about unusual marks of punctuation. Author of SHADY CHARACTERS, THE BOOK, EMPIRE OF THE SUM and now FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMOJI (

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Keith Houston@shadycharacters· 18d

The Japanese translation of “Empire of the Sum” was published last year by Hara Shobo, but my own copy arrived in the post only the other day. What a nice edition! Many thanks to Hara Shobo for sending me one. Take a look at http://www.harashobo... if you′re interested in ordering a copy! 1/2

The cover of the Japanese edition of "Empire of the Sum", showing the title and author's name in Japanese and English. The cover is illustrated with an image of four people writing with quills and counting with counting tokens.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jul 11

So, I’m walking down to the canal today with my youngest so he can ride his bike along the tow path, and what do I see but two clumps of reeds which have floated into the canal basin from somewhere farther along the canal. And I think to myself: “This is how papyrus arrived in Egypt!” 1/3

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jun 28

Take a trip to the south of France at the height of summer courtesy of the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u....

A view from the entrance to Narbo Martius, a museum in Narbonne, France, on a sunny day with a blue sky.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· May 31

Inventing a new punctuation mark turns out to be very hard. Mostly, they fade away, never to be seen again - but the “quasiquote” does not deserve that fate. Read more about this ingenious but precarious mark at the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u... (Image courtesy of Ned Brooks.)

A description of the quasiquote from the 1944 Fancyclopedia, written by Jack Speer.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Apr 9

I stumbled on Hurlingham's bookshop by Putney Bridge underground station while visiting London. What a treat! Stop by if you get the chance.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Mar 27

Were you ever put through a slide show of someone’s holiday snaps? Well, I visited Egypt in February and have been telling anyone who will listen how fascinating a trip it was. Lacking a Kodak slide projector, I’ve written a few words about our experiences: staging.shadycharact...

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Feb 8

3D printing is cool. 3D printing in the nineteenth century? Even better. Computerised 3D printing with 19th-century hardware? 😎 Read about two different approaches to modernising the Monotype system in the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u... and shadycharacters.co.u....

Three views of a computerised Monotype typecasting machine, showing pneumatic tubes and electronic components connected to cast iron machinery.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Oct 19

From the Shady Characters archive, journey back to where it all began! Read about the life, death, and afterlife of the pilcrow (¶), or paragraph mark: shadycharacters.co.u.... (Image courtesy of the of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: search.digital-scrip....)

A red capitulum, or paragraph mark, sits at the centre of a block of black handwritten text.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Oct 8

It’s almost here! “Face with Tears of Joy” is having a launch party at Linlithgow’s best bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd, at 6.30pm on Wednesday October 15th. Join us for drinks, snacks, chat, and a reading from the book. Get the details at shadycharacters.co.u..., and see you there!

The cover of "Face with Tears of Joy", showing the evolution of the eponymous symbol from emoticon to emoji.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Sep 15

Podcasts! I recently recorded two of them, in fact, courtesy of Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl (bsky.app/profile/gra...). Head over to Shady Characters for links: shadycharacters.co.u....

Banner for a podcast with Mignon Fogarty and Keith Houston

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Aug 29

I found Elizabeth Goodspeed's short, sweet history of business card design (themalin.co/journal/...) courtesy of Dan Cederholm's newsletter (https://simplebits.com/). Here's one of mine, printed back in 2012 (shadycharacters.co.u...) at in Robert Smail's in Innerleithen (www.nts.org.uk/visit...).

A business card reading "KEITH HOUSTON", then "shadycharacters.co.uk" on the next line. There's a red ampersand at the bottom right.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jul 21

With “Face with Tears of Joy” (shadycharacters.co.u...) now available to buy around the world, I took some time to revisit an older topic at shadycharacters.co.uk – through an emoji lens 🔍, of course! The question at hand: do emoji obey Zipf’s law? Read more here: shadycharacters.co.u....

A graph of normalised emoji frequencies, showing a rapid decline from the first, most common emoji through to a "long tail" of less used symbols.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jul 17

To mark World Emoji Day 🎉 (and, uh, the publication of my book 📖), I put together a little emoji quiz for my publisher, W. W. Norton. Have a crack at it here! wwnorton326.outgrow.... (And buy my book here! shadycharacters.co.u...)

A table showing emoji arranged in rows according to their category, and with the emoji in each row sorted from most positive on the left to most negative on the right.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jul 17

Similar scenes here at Shady Characters HQ 🚅

A photograph of a toy version of "Doctor Yellow", a yellow-painted shinkansen used to measure railway tracks in Japan

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jun 15

What are emoji all about, really? There’s enough to write a book on them (cf shadycharacters.co.u...), but for now, this essay from the Shady Characters archive packs the essentials into a few hundred words: shadycharacters.co.u....

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jun 6

If you want to learn even more about emoji, you can pre-order my book, “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” (shadycharacters.co.u...), which will be published next month. Not long now at all! 3/4

The cover of "Face with Tears of Joy" (W. W. Norton, 2025), showing the evolution of the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY from an emoticon to a shiny, modern 3D-rendered version.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jun 3

The paperback edition of “The Book” is one of Barnes & Noble’s “Best History Books of 2025 (So Far)”: www.barnesandnoble.c...! (Which gives me an excuse, of course, to repost Sarah Bibel’s fantastic cover design.)

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jun 1

Why does the percent sign (%) look the way it does? It’s probably not why you think. Learn more in this post from the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u... (Public domain image from archive.org/stream/r....)

An Italian manuscript from 1425 using the abbreviation "pco" for "per cento".

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· May 18

From the Shady Characters archive: scribbled or scrawled, how do we write ampersands, and is there room for a new ampersand design? Designer Rebecca Kirch dives into the unregulated world of the handwritten "&". shadycharacters.co.u.... (Image courtesy of Rebecca Kirch.)

A series of handwritten ampersands and plus signs, overwritten on top of one another.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Apr 27

Just a couple of days until the paperback edition of “The Book” is published in the US!* Get the details at the blog (shadycharacters.co.u...) or order from B&N at a nice little discount (www.barnesandnoble.c...). * The UK edition will be out in June.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Apr 18

A parcel arrived today from W. W. Norton: a box full of paperbacks of “The Book”! This is the first time I've seen the paperback itself, rather than only PDFs, and honestly, it looks great. Maybe even better than the hardback? (But that would be tantamount to picking a favourite child.) 1/3

A photograph of a page spread from "The Book", showing a full-colour illustration of a medieval manuscript that depicts a monk drinking from a barrel of wine.

A box full of paperback editions of "The Book", featuring a cream band on a green background.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jan 17

A belated happy new year to all Shady Characters reader! I hope 2025 is treating you as well as it can. Here to ease the pain are a few links on the usual subjects of punctuation, typography and emoji: shadycharacters.co.u.... Enjoy!

A sculpture of the peace symbol in two halves, overlooking a beach in Adelaide, Australia.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Dec 16

It's the 2024 Shady Characters gift guide! Which calculator should you buy your loved ones, and why is the £360 Casio S100X? Answers here: shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/12/2024...

The cover of "Empire of the Sum" by Keith Houston.

Slide rule owned by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. (CC0 image courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.)

A Braun ET-66 calculator. (CC BY-SA 2.0 image courtesy of Pinot Dita at Wikimedia Commons.)

A 25th anniversary edition of the HP-12c calculator. (CC BY 2.0 image courtesy of “striegel” on Flickr.)

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Nov 10

Bombs, books and generative AI! A new post at Shady Characters, and one that takes a look at how this AI malarkey intersects with a rather older information technology: shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/11/bomb....

A graph of the carbon-14 "bomb pulse" caused by atmospheric nuclear testing.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Sep 24

It's national punctuation day! Only, uh, the NPD website seems to have gone dark: www.nationalpunctuationday.com. But we at Shady Characters do not yield to unpaid domain fees, and punctuation is to be celebrated every day of the year!

Interrobang image courtesy of Penny Speckter.

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Sep 8

Happy world ampersand day! The '&' was one of the first characters I wrote about for Shady Characters back in 2011. My series on the '&' is still available (shadycharacters.co.uk/series/the-a...), and it has also guest starred in many posts since then (shadycharacters.co.uk/tag/ampersand/).

A line drawing of an ornate hotel with the caption "Hotel Ampersand".

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Aug 24

Now up, Miscellany № 103! In which we learn that crows can count (out loud!); microchips are as cheap as chips; and the calculator lives again (if you own an iPad): shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/08/misc.... (Image by Michael Holley.)

A Unicom 141P printing desktop calculator in a beige enclosure with black keys

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Jul 7

Now up, Miscellany № 102, in which I report on an exhibition of books at Harvard (now finished), a bookshop in St Andrews (now closed), and some novel bookbinding techniques (now obsolete): shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/07/misc.... Yes, this one took me longer than I had anticipated. Enjoy!

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Dec 23

It's the final day of the Shady Characters advent calendar! To round things off, I'm taking a look at the Sinclair Executive, a 1970s British success story that eventually spawned a peculiar Cold War myth. Read more at shadycharacters.co.uk/2023/12/adve...! Happy holidays!

A Sinclair Executive calculator. (CC BY-SA 3.0 image courtesy of MaltaGC on Wikipedia.)

Keith Houston@shadycharacters· Dec 21

It's day 11 of the Shady Characters advent calendar! What was the first breakout consumer electronic device? Some commentators would say you're looking at it: the sleek, innovative HP-35 scientific calculator. More here: shadycharacters.co.uk/2023/12/adve...!