Keith Houston > Quotes

“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. – Thamus, on the invention of hieroglyphics”
― Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time

“Like laws and sausages, if you love parchment it is perhaps best not to see it being made.”
― Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time

“Both marks were formed by single pen-strokes named virgulae, the diminutive of the Latin virga for "rod" or "staff", or even, in medieval slang, "penis".”
― Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks

“This book is about the history and the making and the bookness of all those books, the weighty, complicated, inviting artifacts that humanity has been writing, printing, and binding for more than fifteen hundred years.”
― Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time

“Rumors of the footnote’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
― Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks