April 19 to 25 is National Library Week. As a nation we rightly honor the public library as a keeper of memories of the human experience and a place to conquer all that is wrong in the world. Our friends, the able librarians and their assistants graciously welcome us and intelligently refer us to the fonts of entertainment and knowledge awaiting us on the library shelves. Even though the doors are now closed to protect our health, e-books, audio books, and other resources are still available through the library.

Let’s look at something smaller than a library but larger than a virus: Apostrophes! Can this little punctuation mark be our friend too? Yes, it can help to guide and clarify what we read. This tiny sometimes-curly mark indicates possession and alerts us to a missing letter or two in a contraction. Doesn’t it?

Our grammatical friend, Apostrophe, has suffered abuse though. And to save it, John Richards, a retired sub-editor in the UK, established the Apostrophe Protection Society in his Lincolnshire home town of Boston, in 2001, with 257 members.

The society’s first success was getting the Boston library to write “CDs” instead of “CD’s.” CDs, of course is not possessive unless you write “the CD’s title is. . .” for example.

Another of the society’s gripes was that many local stores removed the apostrophe from family-named stores, such as Harrods, Waterstones, Currys, in contrast to properly punctuated McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s (and Macy’s!)

In 2001 Richards won the satiric IgNobel Prize for “his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.” An endeavor I heartily applaud! As I show correctly: “the Harkins left Ireland.” “This is Jean Harkin’s blog.” “Let’s visit the Harkins’ house.”

I am trying to be as polite in my examples as Richards and his son Stephen tried to be. But sadly, the Apostrophe Protection Society folded in 2019, overtaken by a tide of faster, more careless punctuation styles. For one thing, print media tends to begrudge the spaces taken up by “unnecessary” punctuation. Even commas are now suffering!

Back to the library: When it’s safe to return to normal life after the pandemic, be sure to visit your local library and celebrate the friendship and valuable assistance provided there. Two books you might check out and enjoy are the following:

1) “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean
2) “The Great Typo Hunt” by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson

* Thanks to Wikipedia for information about the Apostrophe Protection Society.