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Stories of Punctuation and Typographic Marks: A Reading List

With the Read Harder Challenge including a Microhistory, this looked like an interesting collection!

Longreads

From the now-ubiquitous hashtag (or octothorpe, hash, pound, or whatever you like to call it) to the loved, hated, and misunderstood semicolon, punctuation marks not only help us shape our stories, but also have their own origins and histories and have become part of the narratives of our lives. Here are picks about six punctuation marks, from the comma to the asterisk.

1. “Holy Writ” (Mary Norris, The New Yorker)

“The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Norris describes her early days at The New Yorker, from collating to working on the copydesk — reading greats like John McPhee and Pauline Kael — and her current job, more than thirty years later, as a comma queen.

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Fun Facts — Books!

I love the feel of a real book in my hands. From the weight and feel of the pages to the scent, it’s just better. Add in that the battery never dies and it’s the perfect media.

I’ve only read five of the top ten books ever sold. I find it sad to see some of those on this list when there are so many better books out there.

Always my go to with my kids, Dr. Seuss is amazing. I would love to have a complete library of his books (including his dirty book).

Schindler’s List

I have seen this movie countless times and loved it every time. This was the first time I sat down to read the book and I’m very glad I did. As expected, it included much more detail than could be pressed into the movie, even with as long as it is. While there were variances, characters that were two in the book yet merged into one for the movie, scenes that were split in the book but condensed in the movie, the movie followed very closely the overall outline of the book.

I loved the author’s adherence to facts. Through records and interviews, he was able to rebuild this with more accuracy than I would have ever expected. That he even included notations when he didn’t have an exact record but was going on supposition of what the result of some private conversation was drew me in all the more. Though I, of course, don’t have the ability to go through and verify everything in the book, his admittance when something was a guess brings me to believe that it was written as factually as possible.

I was a bit disappointed that Itzhak Stern was not shown as prominently in the book as he was in the movie. Instead, he seems to have been melded with the man Goldberg who was the actual typist of the List. I was happy to see, though, that Stern along with several other families from the factory were a permanent part of Schindler’s life during the years after the war.

As much as I knew of what was done during the war, the atrocities inflicted on the Jews (and others) by the Germans, one part of this book stood out to me above the rest. It wasn’t surprising to learn that the synagogues were destroyed by the Germans. Not a fact I knew, but it was in keeping with what I was aware of. The graves, though. The graves of the long dead were desecrated as well. That it wasn’t enough to kill the Jews who still lived, that they felt it necessary to go beyond that, is unfathomable to me.

“When level with the Administration Building, the Adler moved onto a prison road paved with Jewish gravestones. The campsite had been till two years before a Jewish cemetery. Commandant Goeth, who claimed to be a poet, had used in the construction of his camp whatever metaphors were to hand. This metaphor of shattered gravestones ran the length of the camp, splitting it in two…”

This was made even more profound to me in a later passage in the book. Stern was giving a tour of the camp to two of Schindler’s “brother industrialists” who were there to record what they were seeing. One held a small camera to collect evidence. They told Stern to pause and tie his shoe whenever there was something in the area he wanted to make sure they saw.

“Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859–1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.”

One detail about Schindler that was left out of the movie shows again how different he was from the other Germans. While some were busy doing as much damage as they could, he was the exact opposite. He not only saved all those he could, but he established a Jewish cemetery on consecrated ground for those who arrived dead from the Goleszow camp along with any who passed away in his factory from old age or illness. Why these things stood out for me so much even with all the rest, I can only guess. Repeated exposure to the stories of the death chambers, the cruelty, maybe that has desensitized me a bit. I would hope not and they can still bring a tear, but these two new details tugged at my heart more than anything else in the books but one.

In the movie, the only spot of color is the little girl in red. She is seen walking along in one scene, then very shortly presented as a corpse atop a wheelbarrow of other dead bodies. In the book, however, that little girl seems to have survived, somehow mingling and hiding in plain sight until later taken in by a family and hidden. I don’t know the little girl’s eventual fate, but it was a relief to me not to read about her as another death among many.