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in the margin of the right-hand column are a number of double dotted
obeli, or lemnisci (H-).
be seen and for the next seven centuries manuscripts hosted a messy
riot of imposters acting in its place. Only the arrival of printing could
deliver the defibrillating jolt necessary to bring this ragtag army of
“debased” diples into line.
X and permanently changed writing and punctuation. Time-
consuming luxuries such as handpainted illustrations and rubricated
marks of punctuation* fell victim to the economies of scale enabled
by this new means of production.’0 The marking of quotations was
affected too, and deeply so: Gutenberg’s system of movable type made
underlining and printing in colored ink time-consuming and imprac¬
tical; not to mention that early printers were curiously resistant to
cuttingpunches for the diple’s divergent ranks of descendants.” Thus,
the earliest printed books relied on a battery of temporary measures
such as alternative typefaces and parentheses, along with nontypo-
graphic methods such as verbs of speaking. Gutenberg’s Bible itself
did not graphically distinguish quotations at all.
tively rebooted. The army of “corrupt” handwritten diples was
replaced, en masse and essentially overnight, by simple double com¬
mas Derived from the slanted virgule (/) and used to indicate a
brief pause,t the comma was a relative newcomer to the manuscript
tradition; its adoption by printers in lieu of the diple seems to be
of the arrival of printing.