2  Two Shops

Chapter four of Full Stop is about the dash, and its title is “A Fashionable Interruption.” I was proud of the title. I will have to bring it up again later, and I will be less proud.

The argument of chapter four is that the dash did not spread on its own. Marks rarely do. Somebody has to set them in type, over and over, until readers stop noticing them and start expecting them. In chapter four, that somebody is a printer’s shop. Its compositors liked the dash, used it where their neighbors used a comma or nothing at all, and printed enough popular books that within a generation every other shop was doing the same. I had sources. I had a paragraph about the shop’s apprentices that I still think is the best thing I have written about anyone who handled lead for a living.

Chapter nine is about the semicolon. The semicolon is a quieter mark with a worse reputation, and I gave it a sympathetic chapter, the way you sit next to the one person at a wedding nobody knows. Halfway through, to explain why the semicolon lost ground when it did, chapter nine says the dash took it. It also says who handed the dash over: a rival shop, across town, whose compositors set dashes where everyone else set semicolons, and who printed enough popular books that within a generation every other shop was doing the same.

I wrote chapter nine about a year after chapter four. I had different sources by then. I did not reread chapter four, because I had written it and knew what it said.

Red had read both chapters, and said nice things about each.

I won’t name the shops. They’ve suffered enough, and so have I. Here they are the shop in chapter four and the shop in chapter nine, which is how I came to think of them anyway.

Fixing it looked easy. One of the two chapters was wrong, or at least less right, and I only had to decide which. I went back to the sources, decided chapter four was less right, and rewrote its last third so that its shop took up the dash early but the rival made it popular. That was a smaller claim, and smaller claims are easier to defend.

Then I read chapter four through, and it no longer had an argument. A chapter about a shop that was early to a fashion is a chapter about being early. Nobody wants to read about being early. So I gave chapter four its shop back and moved the doubt into chapter nine, where the rival now “helped popularize” the dash, a phrase that means nothing and that I typed anyway.

That left a hole in the middle of chapter nine where the semicolon’s decline used to be explained.

That was the first round. I am not going to say how many there were. More than I told Hedda. More than I will tell you.

Each fix needed a footnote in the other chapter. If four gave its shop the credit, nine needed a note saying the rival’s part was discussed in chapter four. When four changed, the note in nine had to change, and the change in nine needed a note in four. By the end the footnotes cited footnotes. Note fourteen in chapter four said “but see note twenty-two in chapter nine,” and note twenty-two in chapter nine said “for a qualification, see note fourteen in chapter four,” and a careful reader could follow them for as long as a careful reader liked.

I printed both chapters and pinned them to the wall above my desk, four on the left and nine on the right, facing each other, like seconds at a duel. It helped to see them at once. I marked four in red pencil and nine in blue, and the places where they touched in purple, until there was more purple than either.

Then there was the week I decided both shops did it.

It came to me in the shower, which is where the best bad ideas come from. Two shops in the same city, the same years, the same trade, the same customers. Why not both? Each could have taken up the dash on its own, independently, at the same time, the way two people at a dinner reach for the last roll. Nobody had to be wrong. Chapter four could keep its shop, chapter nine could keep its rival, and the footnotes could come down.

It was the happiest week of the book. I took every footnote out. I wrote a new paragraph for each chapter, nearly the same paragraph, saying that the dash had arrived in both shops at once, as ideas sometimes do. I slept well. When Hedda asked how the book was, I said “chapter four” with something close to pleasure.

On the seventh day I reread chapter four from the top, to enjoy it, and I started with the title.

“A Fashionable Interruption.”

Fashion doesn’t happen twice.

The footnotes went back up. I had kept them, in a file called notes-old-DO-NOT-DELETE, which tells you how much I had believed in the week.

After that I stopped trying to win. I tried instead to keep the two chapters from noticing each other. I made chapter four vaguer about the date and chapter nine vaguer about the street. I took the word “fashionable” out of the body of chapter four and left it in the title, where I could not bear to touch it. Every change was small and every change was reasonable, and the chapters got harder to read and no easier to reconcile.

Then I half remembered a sentence in chapter two, which is about the comma, that mentioned a shop and a dash. It was there. It credited neither shop. It credited “the printers of the period,” which was safe, and which was also, now that I looked at it, a third position.

I pinned chapter two to the wall, to the left of four. Chapter six had a line about the dash too, in a paragraph about the colon, so I pinned up six. Chapter seven described the shop in chapter four in a way that fit the shop in chapter nine better. I pinned up seven.

The seconds were no longer facing each other. There were too many of them.

By spring I had run out of wall.