Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It

I look into the origin of CAPITAL LETTERS used for SHOUTING, why we type > to indicate a quoted part of a reply, the resurgence of letterpress through digital assistance, Walt Whitman’s 1888 poem “A Font of Type,” a website archiving itself for 10,000 years, and the surprising origin of “this page intentionally left blank”—and more!

The book’s chapters:

• Nothing Is Lacking: The earliest uses of marking a page as intentionally leaving something out.
• CAPITAL CRIMES: Why we SHOUT with UPPERCASE.
• The Ten-Millennium Safe: A website plans for the far future.
• The Quibble with Online Quotes: Will the Internet kill off curly quotes?
• Look Askew: Slanting type is like stealing sheep.
• Noto Bene: Google builds a massive typeface to represent all the languages of the world.
• You Can’t Quote Me on It! Email and forums ape an ancient textual device in marking quotations.
• A Font of Type: Walt Whitman was a printer, and this poem has deep roots in his background.
• What a Relief: While letterpress seemed destined for the junk heap, it’s making a surprising comeback.
• A Crank Turns a Letterpress: Your author spent hundreds of hours walking a carriage on a press back and forth and thinking about what it meant.