On the Dot: The Speck That Changed the World

A book about the dot? Surely it doesn't get more minimalist than that. Yet this ubiquitous little black blip has found its way into music, encoding, abbreviation, punctuation, mathematics, and a host of other domains for as long as people have been writing at all. The Humez brothers are exuberant in their erudition, providing a wealth of the cultural baggage carried by this humble sign, both in the course of their twelve chapters and in their copious and entertaining endnotes. Good to see these chaps writing again: It's been over a decade since their last book, but On the Dot was worth the wait.

Lynne Truss covered punctuation in 204 small pages with fairly wide margins. The Humez brothers devote 160 pages of smaller type and narrower margins to the period. But "On the Dot" is even more fun than "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". It is very little about how to use the period correctly. It is everything there is to know about the dot, including its history, its use in idioms, Morse code, music, law, mathematics, computers, and as a component of other punctuation. To be sure they cover the target completely, they stray into many other domains where dots are used or were used, including the history of the words used in the descriptions and the examples. It is a lot of fun, but sometimes the diversions seem to drag on. The text is well documented, with 49 pages of notes, a 9 page bibliography, and an index of 32 double column pages. Think about those numbers. The notes follow the pattern of the text, frequently wandering into barely related topics. I suspect that most readers would not enjoy this book, but most readers with lots of curiosity and varied interests will like it.