Keith Houston

From ancient Greece to the Internet—via the Renaissance, Gutenberg, and Madison Avenue—Shady Characters exposes the secret history of punctuation.A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the as

“Everybody who has ever read a book will benefit from the way Keith Houston explores the most powerful object of our time. And everybody who has read it will agree that reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”―Erik Spiekermann, typographerWe may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, gl

The hidden history of the pocket calculator―a device that ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, and went with us to the moon―and the mathematicians, designers, and inventors who brought it to lifeStarting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplant

A vibrant exploration of the world’s newest language—where it came from, how it works, and where it’s going.We are surrounded by emoji. They appear in politics, movies, drug deals, our sex lives, and more. But emoji’s impact has never been explored in full. In this rollicking tech and pop culture history, Keith Houston follows emoji from its birth in 1990s Japan, trace