Shady Characters:  The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other  Typographical Marks, Keith Houston, 2013

Another quirky book, in this case about symbols that we take for granted—the hashtag or pound sign, the ampersand, the pilcrow (paragraph sign), the asterisk, hyphen, dash, manicule, quotation marks, and others.  The history of the printing press, linotype, typewriter, and digital printing have a major impact as did the Church, outstanding authors, and development of new forms, e.g. the novel led to the need for quotation marks to indicate dialogue.  Fun book.