A post from Shady Characters

The Pilcrow, part 2 of 3

This is the second in a series of three posts on The Pil­crow (¶). Start at PART 1, con­tinue to PART 3 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

Com­pared to Rome’s tra­di­tional pa­gan re­li­gion, Chris­tian­ity was al­to­gether a dif­fer­ent beast. Whereas pa­gan­ism re­lied on oral tra­di­tion and its prac­tices var­ied ac­cord­ing to local cus­tom, Chris­tian­ity in­stead em­phas­ised con­form­ity and writ­ten scrip­tures.1 If Juda­ism had been the pro­to­typ­ical re­li­gion of the Book, Chris­tian­ity em­bod­ied this ideal with an un­pre­ced­en­ted vigour, pos­sess­ing a sym­bi­otic re­la­tion­ship with the writ­ten word which sim­ul­tan­eously drove the evol­u­tion of punc­tu­ation and be­nefited from a con­crete, writ­ten dogma. After all, the Word of God had to be trans­mit­ted with as little am­bi­gu­ity as pos­sible.2

The tor­rid period of lion-bait­ing, cru­ci­fix­ions and hu­mi­li­ation which had be­set early Ro­man Chris­ti­ans fi­nally came to a halt in the 4th cen­tury. In 312, on the eve of a battle which would de­cide the ruler of a united Ro­man Em­pire, the pre­sumptive Em­peror Con­stantine was re­por­ted to have wit­nessed a vis­ion of a cross* in the sky. If Con­stantine had been in any doubt as to the im­port of this sym­bol, it was ac­com­pan­ied by a help­ful ex­plan­at­ory in­scrip­tion, HOC SI­GNO VIC­TOR ERIS (“BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CON­QUER” — one might for­give the Almighty for His me­lo­dra­matic use of cap­ital let­ters when one re­calls that His sub­jects had not yet de­veloped lower case), and was fol­lowed that night by a dream in which God in­struc­ted him to march into battle un­der the sign of the cross.3 Need­less to say, the battle was won and Con­stantine’s de­vo­tion to the new re­li­gion was en­sured.4

The Emblem of Christ Appearing to Constantine (1622) by Peter Paul Rubens
The Em­blem of Christ Ap­pear­ing to Con­stantine (1622) by Peter Paul Rubens. (Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

As the first Chris­tian Em­peror, Con­stantine rolled back the in­sti­tu­tion­al­ised per­se­cu­tion that Chris­ti­ans had suffered for 250 years. Chris­tian wor­ship was de­crim­in­al­ised, church lands were gran­ted ex­emp­tions from tax and the state provided la­bour and ma­ter­i­als for the con­struc­tion of new churches.5 Hav­ing set Chris­tian­ity on the road to le­git­im­acy, though, it was to be one of Con­stantine’s des­cend­ants who would in­stig­ate a last throw of the dice for the old re­li­gion.

When Con­stantine’s nephew Ju­lian be­came Caesar in 355,6 he brought with him a mys­tical strand of pa­gan­ism and a de­sire to re­turn poly­the­ism to the centre of Ro­man re­li­gion.7 Un­der the guise of vari­ous edicts en­for­cing re­li­gious tol­er­ance, he subtly aimed to re­duce Chris­tian­ity’s in­flu­ence throughout the Em­pire. The pro­ponents of this last-gasp pa­gan re­vival un­der­stood the value of the writ­ten word as well as their Chris­tian coun­ter­parts: as a re­ac­tion against the en­croach­ments of the new re­li­gion, sev­eral of Rome’s ar­is­to­cratic fam­il­ies sought to pre­serve, edit and elu­cid­ate old pa­gan texts.8 Des­pite this, Ju­li­an’s re­forms were re­versed upon his death, and the turn­ing point fi­nally ar­rived in 380 when Chris­tian­ity was ad­op­ted as Rome’s of­fi­cial state re­li­gion.9

Writ­ing ex­ploded as the new re­li­gion swept through Europe, driv­ing the de­vel­op­ment of much of what we take for gran­ted in mod­ern-day writ­ing and ty­po­graphy. Ar­is­to­phanes’ ven­er­able sys­tem of dots, for ex­ample, was re­vived by the 4th cen­tury gram­marian Donatus10 and pop­ular­ised in the 7th cen­tury by Saint Isidore of Seville. In his me­an­der­ing ref­er­ence work Ety­mo­lo­gies, which would re­main one of the most im­port­ant books in print for over 800 years, Isidore de­scribed a re­or­gan­ised sys­tem in which the comma, colon and peri­odos now lived at the bot­tom, middle and top of the line re­spect­ively.11 The comma was only a tail away from its mod­ern form, and the colon made room for a second point to later ap­pear be­low it. New marks of punc­tu­ation ap­peared, while some old sym­bols as­sumed new mean­ings: the an­cient pos­itura, a ‘7’-shaped mark, now sig­nalled the end of a sec­tion of text (in con­trast to the para­graphos, which marked the start);11 the punc­tus in­ter­rog­at­ivus (?) in­dic­ated a ques­tion, and the diple (>) called at­ten­tion to quotes from sac­red scrip­ture, lead­ing in turn to guille­mets (»), the quo­ta­tion marks still used in many non-Eng­lish lan­guages.12

In the 8th cen­tury the first chinks of light ap­peared in the claus­tro­phobic scrip­tio con­tinua that had dom­in­ated writ­ing for a mil­len­nium. Eng­lish and Ir­ish priests, seek­ing to aid read­ers at­tempt­ing to de­cipher texts writ­ten in un­fa­mil­iar Latin, began to add spaces between words.13 Also in the 8th cen­tury, the cru­sad­ing king Char­le­magne sponsored the cre­ation of the first stand­ard lower­case let­ters to cre­ate a uni­fied script which all his lit­er­ate sub­jects could read. No longer bound to the sol­emn, square majus­cules that suited the stone­ma­son’s chisel, the monk Al­cuin of York took ad­vant­age of the scribe’s dex­trous quill to cre­ate dis­tinct­ive, legible lower­case let­ter­forms with elab­or­ate as­cend­ers, des­cend­ers and flour­ishes — so-called Car­oling­ian minus­cules.14

MS617, Schøyen Collection, showing Carolingian minuscules, word spacing and extensive punctuation
www.schoyencollection.com, MS617. This is leaf from a Bible shows the use of Carolingian minuscule lettering, word spacing, lit­terae not­ab­iliores to mark paragraphs and various marks of punctuation, including ampersands. (Image courtesy of the Schøyen Collection.)

Amid all this in­nov­a­tion and con­sol­id­a­tion, the para­graph mark fi­nally got its mo­ment in the sun. The pil­crow came about in the fer­tile, schol­astic world of the mon­astic scrip­torium.

Just as kaput stood for a sec­tion or a para­graph, so its di­min­ut­ive ca­pit­u­lum, or ‘little head’, de­noted a chapter. The gen­eral Ro­man pref­er­ence for the let­ter ‘C’ had all but seen off the older Etruscan ‘K’ by 300 BC,15 but ‘K’ for kaput per­sisted some time longer in writ­ten doc­u­ments. By the 12th cen­tury, though, ‘C’ for ca­pit­u­lum had over­taken ‘K’ in this ca­pa­city as well.16 The use of ca­pit­u­lum in the sense of a chapter of a writ­ten work was so closely iden­ti­fied with ec­cle­si­ast­ical doc­u­ments that it came to be used in church ter­min­o­logy in a be­wil­der­ing num­ber of ways: monks went ad ca­pit­u­lum, ‘to the chapter (meet­ing)’, to hear a chapter from the book of their re­li­gious or­ders, or ‘chapter-book’, read out in the ‘chapter room’.17

Mon­astic scrip­toria worked on the same prin­ciple as fact­ory pro­duc­tion lines, with each stage of book pro­duc­tion del­eg­ated to a spe­cial­ist. A scribe would copy out the body of the text, leav­ing spaces for a ‘rub­ric­at­or’ to later em­bel­lish the text by adding versals (large, elab­or­ate ini­tial let­ters), head­ings and other sec­tion marks as re­quired. Taken from the Latin rub­rico, ‘to col­our red’, rub­ric­at­ors of­ten worked in con­strast­ing red ink, which not only ad­ded a dec­or­at­ive flour­ish but also guided the eye to im­port­ant di­vi­sions in the text.18 In the hands of the rub­ric­at­ors, ‘C’ for ca­pit­u­lum came to be ac­cessor­ised by a ver­tical bar, as were other lit­terae not­ab­iliores in the fash­ion of the time; later, the res­ult­ant bowl was filled in and so ‘¢’ for ca­pit­u­lum be­came the fa­mil­iar re­versed-P of the pil­crow.16

'C' for capitulum in De Gestis Regum Anglorum, 1125
‘C’ for ca­pit­u­lum in De Gestis Regum Anglorum, William of Malmesbury’s 1125 text detailing “deeds of the English kings”. (Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

As the ca­pit­u­lum’s ap­pear­ance changed, so too did its us­age. At first used only to mark chapters, it star­ted to pep­per texts as a para­graph or even sen­tence marker so that it broke up a block of run­ning text into mean­ing­ful sec­tions as the writer saw fit. This style of us­age yiel­ded very com­pact text,19 hark­ing back, per­haps, to the still-re­cent prac­tice of scrip­tio con­tinua. Ul­ti­mately, though, the concept of the para­graph over­rode the need for ef­fi­ciency and be­came so im­port­ant as to war­rant a new line† — pre­fixed with a pil­crow, of course, to in­tro­duce it.20

The pil­crow’s name — pithy, fa­mil­iar and ar­chaic at the same time — moved with the char­ac­ter dur­ing its trans­form­a­tion from ‘C’ for ca­pit­u­lum to in­de­pend­ent sym­bol in its own right. From the Greek para­graphos, or para­graph mark, came the pro­saic Old French para­graphe, which sub­sequently morphed first into pelag­raphe and then pelagreffe. By 1440 the word had entered Eng­lish, rendered as pyl­crafte — its second syl­lable per­haps in­flu­enced by the Eng­lish crafte, or ‘skill’ — and from there it was a short hop to its mod­ern form.21

The pil­crow had been given form, func­tion and name.

Hav­ing at­tained such a sin­gu­lar im­port­ance, the pil­crow then did something re­mark­able. It com­mit­ted ty­po­graph­ical sui­cide.

1.
Peter Brown R, “The Rise of Western Christendom : Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200 - 1000”, in, 2006. ↢
2.
M B Parkes, “Introduction”, in Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West, 1993, 13-. ↢
3.
Mi­chael Grant, “Con­stantine and the Chris­tian God”, in, 1993, 139-40. ↢
4.
Paul Veyne, “When Our World Became Christian, 312-394”, in, 2010. ↢
5.
Mi­chael Grant, “Constantine and the Christian Church”, in, 1993, 156-58. ↢
6.
Robert Brown­ing, “The Chance of Power”, in The Emperor Julian, 1978. ↢
7.
Dorothy. Watts, “The Pagan Revival of the Late Fourth Century AD 360-90”, in, 1998. ↢
8.
Her­bert Bloch, “A New Document of the Last Pagan Revival in the West, 393-394 A.D.”, 1945. ↢
9.
Mal­colm Erring­ton R, “Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)”, in, 2006. ↢
10.
Ju­lian Brown T, “Punctuation”, Encyclopaedia Britannica. ↢
11.
Isidore and Stephen Barney A, “Punctuated Clauses (De Posituris)”, in, 2006. ↢
12.
Unknown entry ↢
13.
Paul Saenger, “Si­lent Read­ing: Its Im­pact on Late Me­di­eval Script and So­ci­ety”, 1982. ↢
14.
Lane Wilkin­son, “The Humanistic Minuscule and the Advent of Roman Type”, 2009 2009. ↢
15.
David Sacks, “K and Its Kompetitors”, in The Alphabet : Unravelling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, 2003, 206-. ↢
16.
Unknown entry ↢
17.
An­dré Vauchez, Bar­rie Dob­son, and Mi­chael Lap­idge, “Capitulum”, Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. 1, A-J, 2000. ↢
18.
Geof­frey Glaister A, “Rub­ric­ator”, Glossary of the Book, 1960. ↢
19.
El­len Lupton and Ab­bott Miller, “Period Styles: A Punctuated History”, in Design Writing Research, 1999. ↢
20.
An­drew Haslam, “Articulating Meaning: Paragraphs”, in Book Design, 2006, 73-74. ↢
21.
Wal­ter Skeat W, “Notes on English Etymology; Chiefly Reprinted from the Transactions of the Philological Society”, in, 1901, 215-16. ↢
*
In ac­tual fact, Con­stantine wit­nessed not a cru­ci­fix but an early Chris­tian cross called a ‘Chi Rho’ (☧), formed by the su­per­pos­i­tion of the Greek let­ters Chi (Χ) and Rho (Ρ) and which rep­res­en­ted the name of Christ. ↢
†
Im­age to come, sub­ject to rights be­ing gran­ted. ↢

41 comments on “The Pil­crow, part 2 of 3”

  1. Comment posted by John Waugh on

    I had to share this with my wife, who is a graphic de­signer. She re­minded me of Vic­tor Borge’s phon­etic punc­tu­ation (http://​www.you­tube.com/​watch?v=IF4qii853gw). It’s too bad that Borge’s not around any longer – I would like to know how he’d pro­nounce a pil­crow.

    Keep up the good work; this jour­ney through the his­tory of the little things that made the big things pos­sible is a great con­tri­bu­tion.

  3. Comment posted by HP on

    Hav­ing worked as a proofreader in the last days of manual markup, I’d al­ways as­sumed that the “para­graph mark” was ex­actly what it looked like: a double-stroked, mirrored P — P for paragraph.

    Is there any in­dic­a­tion that this folk ety­mo­logy may have in­flu­enced the fi­nal shape of the pil­crow as set in type?

    Maybe in part 3?

    (I also ar­rived via Lan­guage Hat. Thanks, LH!)

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi HP,

      I haven’t come across any­thing which would sug­gest that’s the case, but I have seen some manuscripts when the ca­pit­ula have elab­or­ate, trail­ing tails and I’d al­ways as­sumed that the pil­crow’s ‘P’ shape came about be­cause of that. If I do find any­thing to the con­trary I’ll be sure to up­date the site.

      Thanks for the com­ment!

    2. Comment posted by gabe on

      I think he sug­gest something more mod­ern

      i mean, he, my­self, and prob­ably hun­dreds of font de­sign­ers take the mark to lit­er­ally be a mirrored P nowadays.

      did­n’t they in­flu­enced that when cre­at­ing fam­ous types?

    3. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Ah — I see what you mean. I’m afraid I don’t have any par­tic­u­lar in­sight into why type de­sign­ers draw the pil­crow the way they do, but per­haps some are read­ing Shady Char­ac­ters and could give us an in­sight into this ques­tion…?

  4. Comment posted by Jason Black on

    You know what would be wicked awe­some? If you could some­how man­age to track down the people at Mi­crosoft (or, per­haps, now formerly at Mi­crosoft) who re-in­tro­duced the pil­crow to the world through MS-Word’s “Show hid­den char­ac­ters” func­tion. Ask them how and why they ended up se­lect­ing that mark to rep­res­ent that func­tion.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Jason,

      That’s a bril­liant idea! I’ll see what I can do be­fore the 3rd in­stal­ment.

  5. Comment posted by King Kong on

    Hi, I really like the web­site and this art­icle.
    My one sug­ges­tion would be to re­duce the font a little bit. I don’t know if you’ve spe­cific­ally de­cided to use a large font, but it makes it a little hard to read

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi – thanks for the sug­ges­tion. You can change the font size by hit­ting ‘Ctrl +/-‘ ​on a PC, or ‘Apple +/-‘ ​on a Mac. I must ad­mit to lik­ing the font size as is, but I’ll in­vest­ig­ate chan­ging it if it be­comes a wider prob­lem.

    2. Comment posted by Rick on

      ¶ I have to ad­mit, I find it a re­lief to visit this site in such a big serif font. But per­haps it would be an idea to add a re­duce/​in­crease font size link at the top for those vis­it­ors with other pref­er­ences who don’t know about their browser’s built-in func­tion­al­ity for this pur­pose.

    3. Comment posted by Alan Coughlin on

      Please! It should not rely on per­sonal pref­er­ence. Pro­fes­sion­als have ana­lyzed such things and un­der­stand that there are clear ob­ject­ive stand­ards for legib­il­ity of type. This type is way too large! But the serif face and the large lead­ing very much aide legib­il­ity, com­mu­nic­ate a cer­tain schol­astic air, and give it a re­fresh­ingly ori­ginal look. Just take it down a few points. (And it’s an poor GUI design choice to say “they can zoom out if they find it too large.”)

    4. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Rick, Alan,

      Thanks for the feed­back.

      I must ad­mit that I sub­scribe to the views of the Large Font Co­ali­tion, who re­com­mend body text of at least 16px in size. Body text here is 15pt; at 72 ppi and 96 dpi, this equates to 20px. I might bring the body text down to 14pt, but I’m loath to drop it any fur­ther. I’ll have a play with it be­fore pub­lish­ing the fi­nal part of the pil­crow series.

      I’ve never been quite con­vinced by the idea of adding “font size” but­tons to web­sites. In this re­spect, I agree with Alan’s com­ment that ‘it’s an [sic] poor GUI design choice to say “they can zoom out if they find it too large”’ — provid­ing but­tons to al­ter font sizes em­beds that poor design de­cision into the site it­self. I’d rather have a single ca­non­ical design which renders nicely on a vari­ety of devices: those devices with un­usual screen sizes and/​or res­ol­u­tions (such as smart­phones/​tab­lets) already per­form some re­format­ting/​res­cal­ing on the fly, while stand­ard browsers provide those users who must scale the site for whatever reason with the abil­ity to do so.

      Thanks again for the com­ments!

    5. Comment posted by Luke Jones on

      I’ll echo what I said pre­vi­ously about it and ex­pand. The site is beau­ti­fully type­set and easy to read on my iMac (21.5 at home and 27 at work) and my iPad.

      I’m not con­vinced that the size of the text would be suit­able for many sites, but for a site with this sub­ject mat­ter, it’s more than suit­able.

      I wish I could show you how nice it looks on my iPad, but it’s the end of my lunch break now.

    6. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Luke – thanks! It’s good to hear that the site travels well between your dif­fer­ent devices.

    7. Comment posted by Lyco Notarius on

      I’d like to give my vote of con­fid­ence to the ex­ist­ing font choice.

    8. Comment posted by John Cowan on

      Those “ob­ject­ive stand­ards” work only for av­er­age(d) people. I re­quire a lar­ger font to read text on a screen, as do many people of my age: un­for­tu­nately, this font is fuzzy at my pre­ferred size, so I end up strain­ing at it either way. (I’m us­ing Chrome for Win­dows.)

    9. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi John,

      Thanks for the com­ment. I’m sorry you’re hav­ing prob­lems with fuzzy fonts — it might help me to sort if out if you could send me a screen­shot of Shady Char­ac­ters with the font set to your de­sired size.

    10. Comment posted by Solo Owl on

      It is a de­lu­sion to think a page de­signer can have con­trol over how his page will ap­pear on every read­erʼs screen. Some will be read­ing on an iPad and oth­ers on a 30-inch mon­itor at 2560×1600. Moreover, dif­fer­ent mon­it­ors render col­ors dif­fer­ently, to say noth­ing about am­bi­ent light­ing.

      Be­cause of an in­ferior mon­itor or in­ferior eyes, or simple fa­tigue, in­di­vidual users will want to make ad­just­ments. I en­joy read­ing on my com­puters pre­cisely be­cause (1) I can change the type size at will and (2) news­pa­per ink will not rub off on my hands and shirt­cuffs.

      When you get old you will see what I mean.

    11. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      I quite agree — hence my de­cision to make the site as un­cluttered and as read­able as pos­sible on a vari­ety of devices and to leave tweaks such as zoom­ing to in­di­vidual users (and their browsers).

  6. Comment posted by Leonardo Boiko on

    > and the diple (>) called at­ten­tion to quotes from sac­red scrip­ture

    This part made me raise an eye­brow; the Unix com­puter com­munity that cre­ated email and Usenet (the an­cestor to today’s web for­ums) have long used the AS­CII greater-than char­ac­ter in the same man­ner to quote the pre­vi­ous post—to the point that it’s now, eer­ily enough, called a “ca­non­ical quote in­dic­ator”! (See (http://​tools.ietf.org/​html/​rfc3676#sec­tion-4.5 ). I won­der if who­ever star­ted do­ing that did know about the diple?

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Le­onardo,

      That’s very true! I had­n’t made the con­nec­tion. Maybe the diple is one to cover in the fu­ture. Thanks for the com­ment!

  7. Comment posted by Sharon on

    Great art­icle, but in 1440 Old Eng­lish had already died and given way to Middle Eng­lish.

    Best,
    Sharon

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Sharon,

      Thanks for the cor­rec­tion — I’ve up­dated the art­icle. I’m glad you like it!

    2. Comment posted by Sindre Bremnes on

      To be really pedantic, 1440 is close to the end of even the Middle Eng­lish period. The first great lit­er­ary work of Early Mod­ern Eng­lish, Le Morte d’Arthur, was writ­ten between 1460 and 1470.

    3. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Sindre — my grasp of the evol­u­tion of Eng­lish is, clearly, on the tenu­ous side. I’ve up­dated the text to say just “Eng­lish” — prob­ably safest!

      Thanks for the com­ment!

  8. Comment posted by Charles Perry on

    Me­di­eval Ar­abic MSS lack much punc­tu­ation. Some­times there’s a squar­ish circle to in­dic­ate the end of a sec­tion; some MSS in­dent a be­gin­ning. In some MSS rub­ric­at­ors wrote sec­tion heads in a space the scribe had left (but oc­ca­sion­ally miss­ing it and leav­ing the space blank). At least Ar­abic is writ­ten curs­ively, so you know where a word be­gins and ends, mostly.

    Mod­ern prin­ted Ar­abic has ad­op­ted our punc­tu­ation marks, ex­cept that the ques­tion mark is usu­ally re­versed be­cause Ar­abic is writ­ten from right to left. The comma is usu­ally re­versed too, and of­ten turned up­side down (to make it look less like a let­ter, I ima­gine). I can’t re­mem­ber see­ing any semi­colons — or pil­crows, for that mat­ter.

  9. Comment posted by Theodore on

    Chris­tian­ity is the “pro­to­typ­ical re­li­gion of the Book”? I’m cer­tain that that should be Juda­ism.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Theodore,

      You’re quite right. The point I wanted to make was not so much about the tech­nical in­ter­pret­a­tion of the term but in­stead the in­ter­de­pend­ence between Chris­tian­ity and writ­ten lan­guage and the man­ner in which both be­nefited from it.

      I’d rather not up­date the body of the art­icle in such a fun­da­mental way just yet, but thank you for the feed­back! I hope you en­joyed the post in gen­eral.

    2. Comment posted by Theodore on

      In­deed, I did en­joy the post. But it does make me won­der about his­tor­ical punc­tu­ation in other lan­guages from the re­gion, Hebrew in­cluded ….

    3. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      And now I’m think­ing about it too. I think I’ll have to stick to Greek/​Latin/​Eng­lish punc­tu­ation for the mo­ment, though, oth­er­wise I’ll never get any­thing fin­ished…!

    4. Comment posted by Avi Flax on

      I hope you cor­rect this soon. I’m re­luct­ant to share this oth­er­wise fas­cin­at­ing art­icle with friends while it has such an off-put­ting open­ing.

    5. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Avi,

      Apo­lo­gies for the delay, but I’ve now up­dated the text as de­scribed here. I hope this ad­dresses your con­cerns!

  10. Comment posted by Désirée on

    I love type. I love his­tory. You have com­bined both in a mean­ing­ful way. Thank you. I look for­ward to fu­ture in­stall­ments.

  11. Comment posted by Mark Etherton on

    I’m someone else grate­ful to Lan­guage Hat for dir­ect­ing me here, and I have two com­ments and a quibble.
    Com­ment 1: What an ex­cel­lent site!
    Com­ment 2: The text size looks fine to me.
    Quibble: Is an am­persand really a “mark of punc­tu­ation” (cap­tion to second pic­ture)? The OED calls it a char­ac­ter, and it stands for a whole word, which seems to me to make it qual­it­at­ively dif­fer­ent to punc­tu­ation, “the prac­tice, ac­tion, or sys­tem of in­sert­ing points or other small marks into texts, in or­der to aid in­ter­pret­a­tion; di­vi­sion of text into sen­tences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks” (OED again).

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Mark,

      Thanks! I’m glad you like the site.

      You’re right in that the am­persand is­n’t really a mark of punc­tu­ation. I can only hope the am­persand posts are of suf­fi­cient in­terest for you to for­give my blur­ring of the lines!

  12. Comment posted by John B on

    Re the font size com­ments: One reason to keep it large (in my opin­ion) is that, while Hoe­fler Text is a mag­ni­fi­cent font, the smal­ler point sizes tend to look too heavy (at least on a Mac). For 10 or 12 points, Goudy Old Style looks nicer, though it does­n’t of­fer the el­eg­ant it­al­ics and auto­matic lig­at­ures. All in all, I have no prob­lem with the big type, and find the site design very at­tract­ive.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi John,

      I’m glad you like the site design. I’ve been sur­prised at how well it has been re­ceived; I’m as much of an am­a­teur at design as I am with re­gard to punc­tu­ation and ty­po­graphy!

      The it­al­ics are half the reason I chose Hoe­fler Text. You’re right about it not work­ing so well at smal­ler sizes, though, which per­haps half the reason I’m re­luct­ant to re­duce the font size here. Mono­type Ima­ging have been good enough to grant me per­mis­sion to use some of Eric Gill’s fonts in the third pil­crow entry, and I’m sorely temp­ted to give Joanna a whirl as a web font at some point in the fu­ture — it looks good at a vari­ety of sizes.

  13. Comment posted by John Cowan on

    The ca­pit­u­lum, as dis­tinct from the pil­crow, will be en­coded in Uni­code 6.0 at U+2E3F. It will be some time be­fore it makes its way into com­monly used fonts, however.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi John — in­ter­est­ing! Thanks for that.

      It does feel like a bit of a slip­pery slope: do we then have to define a ‘C for ca­pit­u­lum’ sym­bol too, in ad­di­tion to its des­cend­ants the ca­pit­u­lum and pil­crow, or is cap­ital ‘C’ suf­fi­cient? Uni­code claims to cover “all the char­ac­ters for all the writ­ing sys­tems of the world, mod­ern and an­cient,” but I’m not fa­mil­iar with how it en­codes identical char­ac­ters which have dif­fer­ent se­mantic mean­ings…

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