Book
Signs of civilisation : how punctuation changed history
Edition
Paperback edition.
Languages
Translated from the Norwegian.
Publication Information
London : Sceptre, 2020.
Physical Description
viii, 166 pages : illustration ; 21 cm
Uniform Title
Summary
"With the invention of printing, reading books moved from being an act only performed by priests and aristocrats into an individual, even private, activity. This change helped spark the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution - in which punctuation played a crucial role. As long as texts were read out loud only by an educated elite there was no need for punctuation to mark pauses, full stops or questions. So punctuation - the full stop, the comma, the exclamation mark, the question mark and the semicolon - helped shape modern day Europe as we know it" --
Notes
"First published in Norwegian as Tegn til Sivilisasjon by Spartacus in 2019"--Title page verso.