The pilcrow’s long holiday

1Look at the start of any paragraph in a printed book and you will see a small empty space: the indent. It looks like nothing, and that is roughly what it is. It is the place where a mark used to be.

2The mark is the pilcrow, ¶, the reversed and doubled letter that word processors still show when you ask them to reveal hidden characters. For a long stretch of the history of writing it was not hidden at all. It sat at the head of a new thought, often painted in red, and told the reader that one argument had ended and another had begun.

A letter that became a sign

3The pilcrow started as a letter. Scribes writing in Latin marked a new section, a capitulum, with a C, and over the centuries the C acquired a vertical stroke, then a second one, and its bowl filled in, until it no longer looked like a letter at all but like a small black flag.¹1The name has its own long story through French and English, by way of the Greek word paragraphos, a mark in the margin. By the time it reached English it had become, among other things, “pylcrafte”. Spelling was a looser business then. It was often added after the text was written, by a different person with a different ink: the rubricator, whose job was to put in the red.

4That division of labour is where the trouble began. The scribe would leave a space at the start of each section for the rubricator to fill. When printing arrived, the printers kept the habit, setting the black text and leaving the space for a hand to add the red marks later. And the hands, increasingly, did not come.²2The economics were simple. The black text could be printed hundreds of times in an hour; the red marks had to be painted one by one. One was cheap and one was not, and the cheap one won. Books went out with the gaps empty. Readers got used to the gaps. Eventually the gap was the mark.

The indent as a ghost

5I find this one of the most touching stories in the history of the page. Every indented paragraph you have ever read carries a small absence at its head, the outline of a red mark nobody painted. We have been reading the ghost of the pilcrow for five hundred years and calling it white space.

6These pages put a little of the red back. Each paragraph of an essay has its number in the margin in the second ink, and the first words of every essay are printed in red, the way a rubricator would have marked where a text begins. It is not nostalgia. A number is useful: it lets a reader point to the exact place they disagree with me. That, I suspect, is what the red marks were always for.

Notes

1. The name has its own long story through French and English, by way of the Greek word paragraphos, a mark in the margin. By the time it reached English it had become, among other things, “pylcrafte”. Spelling was a looser business then. ↩

2. The economics were simple. The black text could be printed hundreds of times in an hour; the red marks had to be painted one by one. One was cheap and one was not, and the cheap one won. ↩