JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Mind Your Stops! Punctuation Made Plain and Composition Simplified for Readers, Writers, and Talkers, was a slim volume produced in the U.S. version of the “Sixpenny Library” series, with this version published in New York City by Dick & Fitzgerald in 1855. (It cost 13 cents in the U.S.) It is small (5×4 inches or so) and 32 pages long, and promises a lot, (“Hard Words Made Easy”). There is nothing particularly eventual that takes place in this work, at least from what I can fast-read. The main concern here is the comma (pp 6-16), which takes up about a third of the work and is but one of ten punctuation marks.  (Here are a bunch of them in case I’ve forgotten to use some here–I know there are too many,but you may keep the others for a rainy day===> ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Also included are the colon (pp 16-18), the period (18-20), the dash (20-25), the stopped-dash (25-26), the long dash (26-28), the hyphen (28-29), the note of interrogation (29-30), the note of admiration (30-31), the marks of quotation (31-32), and then all by it self in a lonely half-page or so, the parenthesis (on page 32). 

I’m reproducing this mostly for the cover. Oh: and for some reason only two copies of this work are located in WorldCat, both at the British Library.

 A review from Mechanics Magazine, (Volume 63) edited  by John I Knight, Henry Lacey,, which appeared in 1855: