Keith Houston
Headshot for Keith Houston
Agent: Laurie Abkemeier
Personal Website

Keith Houston is the founder of the blog Shady Characters, where he writes about the unusual stories behind some well-known—and some rather more outlandish—marks of punctuation. By day, he writes medical visualization software. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and lives in Birmingham, England.

  • EMPIRE OF THE SUM: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
    W.W. Norton, 2023
  • THE BOOK : A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
    W.W. Norton, 2016
  • SHADY CHARACTERS: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
    W.W. Norton, 2013
  • FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY: A Natural History of Emoji
    forthcoming from W.W. Norton