Jane Merryman

Alberto Manguel . A History of Reading. 1996.

As I drove through Penngrove a few days ago, I noticed on the side of the road a couple of red flags that warned of a new stop sign ahead. In Europe such a caution would be a black and yellow sign with a big fat exclamation point in the center. According to Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, punctuation is a fairly recent development—words and sentences used to run into each other in one long unbroken stream of letters. For many centuries only a vague system of dots and dashes in the text gave hints to the reader when to stop or pause. Nowadays, along French and Italian roadsides we have punctuation without text. Eloquent! Sassy!

Marks other than the exclamation point seem staid and lackluster: the period, adamant but disproportionately small; the comma, a courtier bowing us gently onward; the semicolon, all business and starch. In the days of hieroglyphics, the little pictures were scattered willy-nilly over the “page.” There was no attempt at noun-verb-object in orderly progression. Modern readers are mollycoddled. Writers are told they must put the noun first, follow it with a decent verb, and make sure the object is in plain sight; if not, we never hear the end of it.

Recently, I took a few lessons in oil painting and learned that although artists gather what they have to “say” into a frame, they need to use little tricks to focus our attention within that frame. Otherwise, we wander all over the painting and miss the point. Line, color, and form lead our eyes into the picture and around it to finally land smack dab on the Subject. Punctuation performs this same function on the printed page, leading us forward, slowing us down, taking us down a byway. It cunningly lets us know this is an important bit of information, that is an aside. It tells us when we should be surprised or amazed and when we should be quizzical.

Punctuation saves us from ludicrous statements by substituting for subtle changes in sound. The audience understands perfectly when the graduate at the podium says, “I’d like to thank my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope.” Readers need an extra comma.

Manguel tells us that in the old days, the really old, scroll days, reading was normally done out loud in order to make sense of the smashed-together letters. To read silently was unusual and disturbing to the people around the reader. The library at Alexandria must have been rather noisy with all that scraping of the scroll cases and rolling up and rolling out as well as the readers mumbling or shouting, the better to hear their book. Nowadays, the person who even moves lips while reading is considered not very bright. Reading has become a personal, internal activity—even a retreat, a vacation from the world.

As for the matter of punctuation, the Danish comedian Victor Borge invented a system of sounds—some of them rather rude, all hilarious—for punctuation marks, to be spoken along with the words when reading aloud. If we adopted his scheme, voicing a single comma or period would get to the point and save us hundreds of words—punctuation embodying text. Sass.