Chapter 1 
The Pilcrow
This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up with surprising frequency, dotted about websites with a typographic bent, for instance, or teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque arrangements such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow also appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button that reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns.
For all this quiet ubiquity, the pilcrow gets short shrift in books on typography and punctuation. Take the trouble to look it up and in most cases the humble pilcrow warrants only a few lines, dismissed briskly as a “paragraph mark” that is “only appropriate when brevity is important.”1 More generous definitions might run to mentioning that it has fallen out of common use and that it is sometimes used to indicate a footnote.2 No mention of where its reverse-P shape comes from, or its name; for the pilcrow, this is as good as it gets.
This is a crying shame. The pilcrow is not a mere typographic curiosity, useful only for livening up a coffee-table book on graphic design or pointing the way to a paragraph in a mortgage deed, but a living character with its roots in the earliest days of punctuation. Born in ancient Rome, refined in medieval scriptoria, appropriated by England’s most controversial modern typographer, and finally rehabilitated by the personal computer, the pilcrow is intertwined with the evolution of modern writing. It is the quintessential shady character.
* * *
The orthographic world of ancient Greece was a sparse old place. When reading a contemporary manuscript, a literate Greek of Homer’s time would be faced with an UNBROKENSTREAMOFLETTERS, all uppercase (because at that time there was no other case), with lines running alternately left-to-right and then right-to-left across the page in the boustrophedon, or “ox-turning,” style, after a farmer driving his oxen across a field.3 Perhaps most cruelly, the visual signposts of punctuation that today we take for granted were completely absent. It was the reader’s unenviable lot to tease out words, clauses, and even sentences from this densely packed zigzag of characters.
Despite some recent scholarly murmurs to the contrary, it is generally held that the painstaking task of interpreting a document like this would have been accomplished by reading it aloud.4 At the time, the written word was very much an adjunct to spoken language, and silent reading was the exception rather than the rule. Physically pronouncing the syllables helped a practiced reader to decode and retain their meaning, and to discover the rhythms and cadences lurking in the unbroken text.5
Figure 1.1 Boustrophedon writing at Gortyn, Crete, circa sixth/fifth century BC.
Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian of the great institution at Alexandria in the third century BC, was the first to give readers some room to breathe when he created a system of marks for augmenting texts written according to the rules of classical rhetoric.6 Statements were broken into clauses of varying length and meaning, and a skilled orator would pause or draw breath to emphasize each such unit. Aristophanes defined a system of dots, or distinctiones, to indicate the points at which these pauses should take place—a boon for non-native readers, such as the Romans, who were attempting to decipher Greek literature.7 A century later, the grammarian Dionysius Thrax described the system in his essay The Art of Grammar:
The so-called intermediate 
, subordinate 
, and full 
dots, signaling short, medium, and long pauses respectively, were placed after corresponding rhetorical units called the komma, kolon, and periodos. Though it took centuries for these marks of punctuation to crystallize into the familiar visual forms we know today, their modern names are not so far removed: “comma,” “colon,” and “period.”*
Unlike modern punctuation, which authors use chiefly to make clear the semantics, or meaning, of their words, Aristophanes’s dots were intended solely as aids for reading aloud; distinctiones were to be added retroactively by a reader preparing a text to be performed in front of an audience.9 An intermediate dot, for instance, did not turn the preceding words into a formal rhetorical komma, but rather marked the pause for breath that a reader would take after speaking such a clause aloud, while texts were not terminated with a periodos, or high dot, since after the final letter there was nothing more to punctuate (or read!).10 Even now, many marks of punctuation still act wholly or largely as vocal stage direction: parentheses denote the typographical equivalent of a spoken aside; the exclamation mark implies a surprised, rising tone of voice; and the question mark is as much about inflection as it is about interrogation.
Aristophanes’s system found use only fitfully, and later, as Rome usurped Greece with characteristically brutal efficiency, his distinctiones had to contend with the Roman disdain for punctuation in general.11 Cicero, for instance, an orator, philosopher, and politician from the first century BC who crops up with indecent frequency in any discussion of punctuation or grammar, looked down his aquiline nose at it. He considered that the end of a sentence “ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm.”12 And although the zigzag boustrophedon style of writing had long since been replaced with lines running uniformly left to right, a brief, unrelated Roman experiment* of SEPARATING
WORDSWITHDOTS had by the end of the second century been abandoned in favor of the Greeks’ monotonous, unspaced scriptio continua.14 For the most part, the Romans had no truck with punctuation.
With all this emphasis on reading aloud, it might come as a surprise that the paragraph—a purely semantic construct, with no counterpart in spoken language—had been marked up in texts even before the advent of Aristophanes’s multifarious dots, and continued in common use throughout punctuation’s dark days at the hands of the Romans.
The paragraphos, from the Greek para-, “beside,” and graphein, “write,” first appeared around the fourth century BC and took the form of a horizontal line or angle in the margin to the left of the main text.15 The exact meaning of the paragraphos varied with the context in which it was used and the proclivities of the author, but most often it marked a change of topic or structure: in drama it might denote a change of speaker, in poetry a new stanza, and in an everyday document it could demarcate anything from a new section to the end of a periodos.16 In some uses, the symbol itself marked the start of the new section; in others, it served only to draw attention to a break elsewhere on the specified line.17
The concept of the paragraph weathered changing tastes in punctuation better than word, clause, and sentence breaks, and by the second century AD, paragraphs were marked in a number of ways even as Aristophanes’s dots found themselves out on their ear. The paragraphos soldiered on in a growing variety of forms such as 
and 
, while some readers dispensed with a mark altogether and instead outdented or enlarged the first few letters of each paragraph to yield litterae notabiliores—literally, “notable letters.”19 Still others inserted the letter K for kaput, or “head,” to mark the “head” of a new argument or thesis, and it was this particular convention that would eventually give rise to the pilcrow.20
Figure 1.2 Each horizontal mark, or paragraphos, in this copy of Menander’s Sicyonians from the third century BC, indicates a change in speaker somewhere on the corresponding line. The final paragraphos of the main text is accompanied by a coronis, a decorative symbol marking the end of a section or work.18
This motley collection of paragraph marks was typical of the state of punctuation at the dawn of the first millennium: written by one person and marked up by another (who most probably shared Cicero’s distaste for the form), texts were punctuated inconsistently or not at all. Writing was, however, about to be well and truly shaken up by the biggest upheaval since Rome’s fall from Republic to Empire. The emergence of Christianity a scant few decades after Jesus’s death would change the face of written language on a grand scale, and almost as an afterthought, it would kick-start the pilcrow’s journey from K for kaput to a fully formed mark in its own right.
Figure 1.3 Third line at left: K for kaput, set off by a dot on either side, signaling the “head” of an argument, in a copy of Cicero’s In Verrem from the first century BC/AD.
* * *
Compared to Rome’s traditional pagan religion, Christianity was a different beast altogether. Whereas paganism relied on oral tradition and its practices varied according to local custom, Christianity emphasized conformity and universal, written scriptures.21 If Judaism had been the prototypical religion of the Book, cleaving to the written Word of God, Christians embodied this ideal with unprecedented vigor, driving the evolution of punctuation as they built and consolidated a concrete, written dogma. After all, the Word of God had to be transmitted with as little ambiguity as possible.22
The torrid period of lion-baiting, crucifixions, and humiliation that had beset early Roman Christians finally came to an end in the fourth century. In 312, on the eve of a battle that 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 inscription, HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS (BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER—one might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capitals when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lowercase letters). Constantine’s vision was followed that night by a dream in which God instructed him to march into battle under the sign of the cross.23 The next morning, Constantine did as he was told. The battle was won and Constantine’s devotion to the new religion was ensured.24
As the first Christian emperor, Constantine rolled back the institutionalized persecution that Christians had suffered for 250 years. Christian worship was decriminalized, Church lands were granted exemptions from tax, and the state provided labor and materials for the construction of new churches.25 Having set Christianity on the road to legitimacy, though, after Constantine’s death his legacy came under threat from one of his own descendants: his nephew Julian was intent on giving the old religion a second chance.
When Julian became Caesar in 355, he brought along a mystical strand of paganism and a desire to return polytheism to the center of Roman religion.26 Under the guise of various edicts enforcing religious tolerance, he subtly aimed to reduce Christianity’s influence throughout the empire. The proponents of this pagan revival understood the value of the written word as well as their Christian counterparts: as a reaction against the encroachments of Constantine’s religion, several of Rome’s aristocratic families sought to preserve, edit, and elucidate old pagan texts.27 Julian’s reforms were reversed upon his death, and the turning point finally arrived in 380, when Rome adopted Christianity as its official state religion. The pagan revival had failed, though writing practices were nevertheless strengthened by it.28
As the new, wordy religion swept through Europe, it drove the development of much of what we take for granted in modern-day writing. Aristophanes’s venerable system of dots, for example, was revived by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus and popularized in the seventh century by Saint Isidore of Seville.29 In his meandering reference work Etymologies, which would remain one of the most important books in the West for more than eight hundred years, Isidore described a reorganized system in which the comma, colon, and periodos now lived at the bottom, middle, and top of the line respectively—though the words they punctuated were still welded together without spaces.30 The reorganized distinctiones were joined by new marks of punctuation, while some old symbols assumed new meanings: the ancient positura, a 7-shaped mark, now signaled the end of a section of text (in contrast to the paragraphos, which marked the start); questions were terminated with a punctus interrogativus (?), and the diple (>) called attention to quotations from sacred scripture, leading in turn to quotation marks (“ ”) and guillemets,* the speech marks used in many non-English languages (« »).31 The technology of writing changed too: far from the reed beds of the Nile delta, religious scholars of northern Europe forsook rough Egyptian papyrus for smooth animal-skin parchment, freeing their scribes to create a variety of flowing “uncial,” or “inch-high” scripts.32
Figure 1.4 This leaf from a Bible, circa 800 AD, shows the use of Carolingian minuscule lettering, word spacing, litterae notabiliores to mark paragraphs, and various marks of punctuation, including ampersands.
In the eighth century the first chinks of light appeared in the claustrophobic scriptio continua that had dominated writing for a millennium. English and Irish priests, in an attempt to help readers decipher texts written in unfamiliar Latin, began to add spaces between words.33 Also in the eighth century, the crusading Frankish king Charlemagne commissioned the first standard lowercase letters to create a unified script that 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 used the scribe’s dexterous quill to massage the Holy Roman Empire’s divergent regional scripts into a single lowercase alphabet known as Carolingian minuscule. Sporting distinctive ascenders, descenders, and flourishes, Alcuin’s script is the direct progenitor of today’s lowercase roman letterforms.34
Amid all this innovation and consolidation, the paragraph mark finally, truly, arrived: the pilcrow came about in the fertile, scholastic world of the monastic scriptorium.
* * *
Just as the Latin word kaput stood for a section or paragraph, so later the diminutive capitulum, or “little head,” came to be used in the same fashion. Even though the Roman letter C had all but seen off the older Etruscan K by 300 BC, the orphaned K for kaput persisted in written documents for centuries more.35 By the twelfth century, though, C for capitulum had taken K’s job, and many of the religious documents that formed the bulk of Western civilization’s written works were studded with C’s dividing them neatly into capitula, or “chapters.”36
The interdependence of Christianity and the written word is nowhere better illustrated: C for capitulum was enthusiastically adopted by the monks who painstakingly copied the Church’s books, and their use of capitulum to denote a section of a written work ultimately gave us the name and concept of the “chapter.” Capitulum and “chapter” were so closely identified with ecclesiastical documents that they soon permeated 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.”37
Monastic scriptoria worked on the same principle as factory production lines, with each stage of book production delegated to a specialist. Depending on the relative wealth of a given monastery, this process sometimes began even before a scribe put pen to paper, with the preparation of animal-hide parchment using the skins of livestock reared on the monastery’s land.38 With parchment in hand, whether produced by the monastery itself or bought from a professional “parchmenter,” a scribe would then painstakingly copy out the body of the text, often by lamplight (candles were forbidden because of the risk of fire).39 He would take care to leave spaces so that a “rubricator” could later embellish the work with elaborate initial letters (or “versals”), headings, and other section marks. Named for the Latin rubrico, “to color red,” rubricators often worked in contrasting red ink, which not only added a decorative flourish but also guided the eye to important divisions in the text.40 In the hands of the rubricators, C for capitulum was soon accessorized 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.41
As the symbol’s appearance changed, so too did its usage. At first it only marked chapters, but soon after it started to pepper texts as a paragraph or even sentence marker, breaking a block of running text into meaningful sections as the writer saw fit. ¶ This style of usage yielded very compact text, harking back, perhaps, to the not-so-distant practice of scriptio continua.42 Ultimately, though, the utility of the paragraph overrode the need for efficiency and became so important as to warrant a new line—prefixed with a pilcrow, of course.43
¶ 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 Middle 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.44 The pilcrow had been given form, function, and name.
Figure 1.5 Taken from Henry Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Anglie [The laws and customs of England], dated to the second half of the thirteenth century, these fragments show familiar, ¢-like capitula placed at the start of lines to mark paragraphs.
¶ Having attained such a singular importance, the pilcrow then did something remarkable. It committed typographical suicide.
¶ Taking pride of place at the head of every new paragraph, the pilcrow had carved out a niche for itself at the heart of late medieval writing. Boldly inked by the rubricator, the marks grew ever more elaborate and time-consuming to add. Unfortunately, the deadline is not a modern invention. On occasion, time would run out before the rubricator could complete his work, leaving undecorated the white spaces carefully reserved for pilcrows, versals, and other rubricated marks. With the advent of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, the problem was compounded. The first printed books aped handwritten works as closely as possible, leaving gaps in the printed text for the rubricator to later fill by hand, and as the volume of printed documents grew exponentially, it became increasingly difficult to attend to them all.
¶ The rubricated pilcrow became a ghost: its brief reign as the de facto paragraph mark was over, usurped by the indented paragraph.45
* * *
Even after this ignominious relegation from mainstream use, the pilcrow refused to be done away with. Robbed of its raison d’être, it nevertheless survives as a proofreading symbol (where, aptly enough, it signifies a point at which a paragraph should be split in two), in legal documents, and as a boutique character used to bring a historical or typographical flourish to a work.46
One of the pilcrow’s most intriguing appearances in this capacity came in An Essay on Typography, a book written by the famed English sculptor Eric Gill.47 Born in 1882 and brought up the son of a Protestant minister, at thirty-one Gill converted to Catholicism and led an increasingly ascetic life as a monkish, artistic polymath.48 His charisma and trenchant views attracted a retinue of like-minded contemporaries to a series of rural communities—communes, almost—with Gill at their center.
By the time Gill and his printing partner René Hague published Essay in 1931, Gill’s suspicion of industrial society had cohered into a philosophy very much in the vein of the Arts and Crafts movement of the time, celebrating hand craftsmanship and reviling the uniformity of mass production. Essay was as much a manifesto as an educational textbook, its very genesis a canonical example of that same philosophy: Gill wrote the text, set it in a typeface of his own design, and, with Hague, printed the first edition by hand.49
Essay’s bold use of the pilcrow stands out to the modern reader from its very first line, as Gill sets out his stall in a forthright manner:
¶ Essay made creative use of the pilcrow, simultaneously recalling its medieval heyday and introducing a subtle extra level of semantic meaning: a pilcrow at the start of a line introduced a new thread of discussion, whereas a pilcrow in running text separated paragraphs within that discussion.51 The result is text that appears haphazard at first (why does the pilcrow jump from the start of one line to the middle of another?) but which echoes the Arts and Crafts ideology in its marriage of simplicity of expression and richness of meaning. ¶ Gill’s book abounds with other hints of that same philosophy. Whereas many books “justify” text (in other words, they align it to both left- and right-hand margins) to provide a uniform appearance, Gill used a “ragged right” setting to mimic a handwritten manuscript. Abbreviations such as “&,” “tho’,” and “sh’ld” evoked medieval scribal tradition and, providing narrower alternatives to the full words they represent, could be judiciously employed to prevent too ragged a right-hand margin. Illustrations were all taken from engravings cut by the author himself. ¶ The abiding impression, when confronted with one of the five hundred first edition copies of Essay, with its ragged hand-cut pages and the fading ink of Hague & Gill’s signatures on the final page, is one of a labor of love.
Gill’s Joanna, the blocky yet elegant typeface in which Essay is set, was based in part on his earlier Perpetua type and was described by the artist himself as “a book face free from all fancy business.” This is not the whole truth, however, and Joanna bears a number of idiosyncratic touches that defy its supposed plainness. Unlike traditional roman typefaces, Gill used horizontal and vertical strokes of similar width, married to square serifs that had been fashionable a century earlier.52 Perhaps most noticeably, the narrow italics slope at a shallow three-degree angle and forgo the traditional italic forms for the letters f, k, v, w, and z.53 Joanna lends Essay a distinctive air and an easy readability.
Figure 1.6 Gill Sans, Joanna, and Perpetua: Eric Gill’s most famous typefaces.
Although today Gill’s typefaces are most visible of all his works, his chief occupation was as a sculptor, and his prodigious output as such seemed positively calculated to bait the prurience of his day. His first major commission was to carve the Stations of the Cross (a traditional Catholic depiction of Christ’s final hours) for Westminster Cathedral, and churchgoers were shocked by their unspiritual directness.54 While working on the Stations in the cathedral, a woman approached Gill to tell him that she did not think they were nice carvings; he responded, in characteristic form, that it was not a nice subject.55
Another of his works, a near-life-size carving of a couple entwined in a sexual embrace that Gill carved in 1910–11, posed problems both in creation and exhibition. Gill was forced to post an apprentice outside the modeling sessions in which his sister Gladys and her husband Ernest posed for the sculpture. Initially sold to a local private collector with a penchant for racy works of art, tastes had become liberal enough by 1949 that the sculpture could be sold at auction.56 Even then, Gill’s original title for the piece (as recorded in his private diary) was still considered too brazen. For public consumption, the cheerfully direct They (big) group fucking became the rather more circumspect Ecstasy.57
Despite frequent forays into then-taboo subjects, after his death Gill remained well known mainly for his artistic successes and staunch Catholicism. The Eric Gill known to his close-knit family and followers, however, was a startlingly different man. In 1961, twenty-one years after his death, the BBC broadcast an hour-long radio documentary about the artist, and in it could be discerned the first hints of the extraordinary gulf between Gill’s public façade and the reality of his private life. Interviewed for the program, Gill’s partner René Hague—now married to Gill’s daughter Joan—spoke about his father-in-law’s attitude toward evil:
The awful truth behind Hague’s musings became clear in 1989 when an unflinching biography revealed adultery, incest, child abuse, and even bestiality within the Gill household.59 The artist’s posthumous reputation was rocked by these revelations, yet despite this (or perhaps partly because of it), Gill remains a resonant name within the typographical world and Essay one of his most enduring contributions to it.
* * *
Despite occasional celebrity appearances as a paragraph mark (such as in An Essay on Typography), the pilcrow remains largely alienated from its traditional role. As compensation, perhaps, it has since acquired a sort of talismanic power for those in the know, especially in the worlds of typography, design, and literature. Jonathan Hoefler of the type design firm Hoefler & Frere-Jones (the company is perhaps most famous for its 
typeface, as used for Barack Obama’s distinctive 2008 presidential campaign posters) penned an essay about the joys of designing pilcrows; the Pilcrow Lit Fest takes its name from the character, and the eponymous protagonist of Adam Mars-Jones’s second novel takes “Pilcrow” as his pseudonym, comforted by its status as an outsider.62
Figure 1.7 Modern pilcrows, as tucked away in the dark recesses of modern digital typefaces. All set at 72pt and equalized in height. At top are a number of revivals of much older typefaces; left to right are Linotype Didot, Adrian Frutiger’s 1991 interpretation of Firmin Didot’s late eighteenth-century French typefaces; Big Caslon (Carter & Cone Type), a display face by Matthew Carter based on William Caslon’s early eighteenth-century designs; Hoefler Text, a book face designed for Apple by Jonathan Hoefler in 1991 and inspired by Garamond and Janson’s typefaces of the seventeenth century; and lastly the odd one out, Linotype Zapfino by Hermann Zapf, a digital font based on a calligraphic alphabet of Zapf’s own design dating from 1944.60 At bottom, modern fonts with well-defined missions in life; left to right are the quintessentially modern Helvetica (Linotype); Skia, designed by Matthew Carter to show off a new Apple rendering technology; Courier New, designed as a typewriter face for IBM, updated by Adrian Frutiger, and now used primarily in Microsoft Windows; and finally Museo Slab, a modern slab-serif font by Jos Buivenga.61
Figure 1.8 Hidden characters revealed in a word processing program. The typeface used here is Eric Gill’s Perpetua.
Hints of the pilcrow’s former lives do still crop up in unexpected places. The Church of England’s Book of Common Worship employs pilcrows as section markers and bullet points, recalling the medieval capitulum.63 Clicking on that innocuous, pilcrow-labeled button in your word processor turns otherwise invisible spaces and line breaks into dots and yet more pilcrows, lending the average computerized document a dignified medieval appearance.
If the pilcrow is ever to be fully rehabilitated, its best chance lies with another, rather more significant, computer-based innovation. The Internet has fostered a new burst of interest in typography: amateur typographers design countless new fonts on inexpensive computers; personal web pages have democratized typesetting in a way unimaginable to Gutenberg or Gill, and disused characters have been rescued from obscurity to add spice and dignity to the everyday exchange of information. The pilcrow among them has once again carved out its niche as a paragraph mark, and is returned to its former glory in the glow of the computer screen.
, 
, or ¶ at will. The squat hyphen-minus reminds us how efficiently the typewriter brutalized our ideas of civilized typography; that word processors now swiftly and automatically replace them with en and em dashes gives us hope that we might already have found our way back again.
).13
), formed by the superposition of the Greek letters chi (X) and rho (P) and which represented the name of Christ.
, bravely titled with an interrobang, is still listed in digital catalogues with a bipartite “!?”.9