Interview to Mary Austin
For the occasion of the second radio show of Special Issue 28, I interviewed Mary Austin about her marvelous work on punctuation. I also interviewed her husband, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. His interview is here.
Here is the audio of the entire interview to Mary:
The following is an automatic unedited transcription that I will re-read and polish soon (ish).
Tommi: Hey, it’s Tommi from XPUB. The other day I was at the opening of the new, shiny, also very cozy and lovely headquarters of the rebooted Internet Archive Europe. On a shelf, I saw these very interesting punctuation marks and, as we are investigating and studying the alphabet as a software, I was wondering: what are those? I have here with me the inventor of these very special punctuation marks, Mary Austin. Hi!
Mary Austin: Hi Tommi, nice to talk to you.
Tommi: I would like to ask you, how did the idea of making this come to your mind?
Mary: Well, actually, I have been fascinated by punctuation for a very long time. In fact, at the San Francisco Center for the book, which is an organization I co-founded with Kathleen Burch in 1996 (a long time ago now), I put together a couple of punctuation parties, so I had invited all of the friends and the community of the San Francisco Center for the Book to come and celebrate punctuation and all its manifestations, and we had a walk of punctuation, instead of the Hollywood walk of stars. We had exclamation points and ellipses and all sorts of punctuation made with chalk on the street, and people would come up the concrete carpet to the Center for the Book, and celebrate punctuation. We encouraged people to dress up as their favorite punctuation mark, and we have some wonderful examples. One of my favorite friends of mine, Judith Selby Lang, came with a necklace that was quite beautiful. It was sped across her, her breast, and it had these long cylinders with sticks kind of going out. So it’s just like a sunflower with her head in the top. And as we got closer, we were like “Judith, what are those?” And, all of a sudden, you realize as a woman that they are tampon applicators, that it’s kind of a very personal thing, but she collects plastic and she had collected all of these tampon applicators and had strung them around her neck. So she was coming as the period. And so we thought that. Quite wonderful. People came dressed in period costumes. I had a good friend who came as the Oxford comma. She had an Oxford cloth shirt, and instead of a little horse or alligator, she had embroidered a comma, and so she was the Oxford comma. It was just a lot of fun. Who knew that punctuation could be so much fun? Anyway, because of that party, I connected up with a wonderful woman, Maureen Fores, who was also very interested in punctuation, and she decided to do an artist collective project, where she invited a number of artists to get together and create an artwork about a piece of punctuation. It was going to be a year long project, this was during COVID. What else are we going to do? It’s like, “Oh, that sounds fun”. And so the first prompt that she gave us, the first month in January, was the exclamation point. Well, I love the exclamation point. I have a bunch of wood type pieces of exclamation points. I have a whole collection of them. They’re physical exclamation points, yes. Well, I love lots of punctuation, but it’s one of my favorites. But I thought: “well I’d like to do something a little different”. So the first month I did what I consider a piece of punctuation called the emphatic pause, which is basically an exclamation point with a comma at the bottom, when you just have to like make something exclaimed in the middle of a sentence. So I decided that this was a project with a number of artists that I quite respect, and there was no way I was going to compete with the aesthetics of these artists that I was going to make a design project ???incent???. So on the front, you have the mark and of the name of the mark is in Blair Medium, one of my favorite typefaces. And then on the back of the mark is a reference card, a reference entry. So in the case of the emphatic pause, it is a dictionary entry. And so it starts with ellipse now, when an ellipses, dot dot dot is two, dot dot much. So, you know, I just kind of had fun with the whole idea of punctuation. I concluded, so this dictionary page is obviously from the letter E. It includes the ellipse, the ellipses, the em dash, the emphatic pause, the en dash, and just when you need to have something a little more spicy in your separations, the dash. So I had a great deal of fun. I used Bahaus 93 as a base typeface for the punctuation. Then the second month came along, and we were supposed to do the dagger. Now, Bahaus, as we all know, is a very impactful typeface. It is strong. It is sharp. Oh, and I looked at the dagger for Bauhaus 93, and it was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That is not at all what the dagger should look like. So the piece of reference material on the back is actually an evidence sheet. And so I’m saying that the crime is that there’s a missing dagger in this typeface. Obviously, they just substituted something else in. And, you know, when it asked to describe below the items involved in interminable detail, you talk about the single dagger, the double dagger, the triple dagger, which is a variant with three handles on it, the quadruple dagger, which we call the bragger, and the quintuple dagger, which we call the swagger. So anyway, as you can tell, I just had a tremendous amount of fun with this project. We continued on through the months and the Interrobang, which is if something gives the exclamation point a run for its money, it’s the Interrobang, which was really popular in the ‘60s and actually was on a couple of typewriters, believe it or not. So the reference page is the Wackipedia, entry, and I’ve got all sorts of fun entries on this. Anyway, the whole project continued for April, the punctuation was a comma. I’m quite fond of com cosmopolitan, so we renamed it the comapolitan and we had a recipe card on the back and then had a bunch of reviews like you would have online from my favorite is Shady Character, which is actually Brewster. But Jay Johannes G, Aldis M., and Mary Norris, who is the comic queen at the New Yorker Magazine. Crazy, but can I ask you, so Sure. every month has, instead of a team, has its own punctuation. It has its own pctuation. So it’s a bit of a calendar. Yeah, if you would, yeah, of course, you could use it as a calendar. And it’s it really was a chance to explore something that I love in a creative way that I hadn’t really thought of. For instance, in June, I think it was, was the ellipses, and I found reference materials for all the ellipses in Ulysses. And you know, people Joyce Ulysses. Yes. Well, you know, James Joyce was known for kind of his irreverent and fantastical use of language and he used ellipses. There was one time in the book, he actually used just two dots, so I would call that ellipse, not really an ellipses. And then all of these times, it was three dots, there were quite a few four dots, a number of five dots, six, even seven dots. And, you know, what this project really allowed us to do was all of us, was really kind of explore punctuation in a playful and a wonderful way, because it’s so important to be able to understand through language and punctuation gives you the tools for you to really punctuate your words. And you can pause a little, a lot. It changes the meaning. I mean, it’s so interesting now we have emojis and people use emojis for punctuation, but there’s nothing quite like kind of talking to people about punctuation to for the right people. to get the conversation really going. Thank you very much. Can I ask you also if you think that some of these characters should be ins inserted in an actual font that people should be using. Would you be using them if they were on the keyboard of your phone? Oh, well, certainly. I think that, well, of course, the Intero bang is probably the most obvious piece to have in common usage. You use basically the Interrobang almost every day, any time you say, “W? Or I don’t know.” You know, it just, it’s really that that combination of exclaiming something. But with the question is really, I think, should be an everyday parlance. But there are a lot of other things that I think that we could add to our punctuation. We have a whole haberdashery of dashes, you know, all sorts of things that we just kind of made up, but they’re fun, and why not? We should be using them more. You know, their they were all sorts of punctuation marks that I didn’t know about, but some of my favorite dashes were in we came up with the French Dash, which is a dash with a certain je ne saisoi, or the Spanish dash, a glass of sangria with a dash of the Yonos. Italian dash, a dash of garlic, a Russian dash, red dash, a Chinese dash E, which is actually the number one, but it’s quite beautiful and looks quite a lot like a dash. I also thought that it was interesting that the letters in Morse code that used dashes, just dashes, T is one dash, N is two dashes, and O is three dashes. But if you put them in the order, MOT, you come up with the French word for word. I. Mo, I just thought that was really fun. Oh, and my favorite dash in my haberdashery of dashes is the last one, which is DoorDash. I which I use all the time.
Tommi: Thank you!