Shady Characters

I’m still pinching myself, but recently I had the distinct pleasure on appearing on Clear and Vivid podcast, hosted by the great Alan Alda.

The following was published in issue 13 of MacGuffin Magazine.

It was 1972 and Sinclair Radionics of Cambridge, England, was riding high.

Today, a repost of an entry from my Calculator of the Day series.

Today, a repost of an entry from my Calculator of the Day series: we’re taking a look at the Canon Pocketronic, a machine with a decent claim to being the first ever pocket electronic calculator.

Today, a repost of an entry from my Calculator of the Day series: we’re taking a look at the “math grenade”, as William Gibson calls it in his novel Pattern Recognition, the mechanical, cylindrical, pocketable Curta.

Most slide rules are rectangular.

Not all mechanical calculators were as sophisticated as the arithmometer or as intuitive as the Comptometer – or as large as either of them.

This monster, this typewriter-adjacent behemoth, is a Comptometer.

The machine that belatedly claimed the crown of first practical mechanical calculator, after the failure of Wilhelm Schickard’s Rechenuhr and many other pretenders, was this one: the arithmometer designed by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, administrator…

Wilhelm Schickard’s life overlapped that of John Napier, inventor of logarithms and Napier’s bones, by a quarter century.

The life of John Napier of Merchiston, a Scottish laird who lived from 1550 to 1617, is notable for many reasons.

When it comes to calculating devices, China is synonymous with the abacus.

Tally sticks are our oldest known mathematical artefacts.

Empire of the Sum hardcover.

The Empire of the Sum audio book is out now, narrated by Elliot Fitzpatrick, and this is your chance to win one of four (four!)

Empire of the Sum hardcover.

The following was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 18th, 2023, under the title “Five Best: Books on Great Inventions”.

It has been a long time coming, but Empire of the Sum will be published in the UK and other non-US countries this coming Friday, the 6th of October.

Empire of the Sum hardcover.

It’s out!

Congratulations to Mary Ann Atwood and John W.

I had a lot of fun a few months back recording an interview with Dallas Campbell on the subject of book history for his podcast, Patented.

It’s out!

U.S.

It’s out!

Empire of the Sum hardcover.

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US tomorrow (‼️), the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators.

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US on Tuesday the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators.

My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US this coming Tuesday, the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d start a series of posts about a few of my favourite calculators.

This is your chance to win one of two free copies of Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator!

Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France.

I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years and six-ish months.

I very much enjoyed recording this podcast on the history of books with Dallas Campbell.

I was in St Andrews a couple of weeks ago with my wife Leigh to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary.

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks: What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or “Going Postal”?

As we head towards the holiday season, 2022 edition, good news for next year’s gift-giving conundrums: my esteemed editor, Mr Brendan Curry, has rubber-stamped the Empire of the Sum manuscript, which has now started its journey through the W.

Esteemed Norwegian typefoundry Monokrom (who, of course, designed the fonts used here at Shady Characters), tweeted a while back about a Unicode character called the “Wiggly Exclamation Mark”.

Apologies for the relaxed pace of posts here; I’ve been hard at work on the manuscript for Empire of the Sum, which is currently ping-ponging between New York and Birmingham as my editor helps knock it into shape.

Links!

If I learned anything as I wrote about emoji, it is that emoji is as dynamic as any “real” language.

Underware, the Dutch/Finnish type foundry comprising Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki, is one that gets special characters.

Work continues apace on the new book, but here are a few links I couldn’t let go before the holidays are upon us.

Congratulations to Mykola Leonovych on winning a copy of the new edition of Ciemne typki, the Polish translation of Shady Characters!

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad photograph by the author.

Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it?

As I mentioned last week, email subscriptions are changing.

Feedburner, the Google service that Shady Characters uses to send email notifications of new posts, is closing down its email service.

Hadrian’s Wall is quite a thing.

This sentence: I really #*$@% want to visit a museum. combines a truthful statement with what is known as a grawlix – a pile of non-alphanumeric characters intended to represent (and censor) a profanity.