“Visually, the ampersand is a loner. Thanks to its convoluted development, it has no relatives among any of the letters. And it has a strange brief to satisfy, operating on the same scale as letters but never being mistaken for one…. In the end, the ampersand is a beautiful and uncooperative creature, one we’re lucky to have inherited.” —Tobias Frere-Jones
The ampersand dutifully substitutes for the word “and,” without pretension or pomp. It’s the epitome of a team player, virtually unnoticed but subtly adding pizzazz to the written word. As a logogram—a symbol that represents a word—the ampersand has indiscriminately tunneled its way into hipster hearts and corporate collectives.
It’s not rhythm and blues—it’s R&B. It’s not Dungeons and Dragons—it’s D&D. Perhaps you’ve shopped at H&M or snacked on M&Ms, and maybe you’ve forgotten to pay AT&T because you were too busy watching Mork & Mindy.
The ampersand is also a survivor. It began life as a shortcut for scribes and proved just as useful for early typesetters, eventually working its way into the English alphabet as the 27th letter. We collectively dropped it from the ABCs, and the decline of handwriting and manual typesetting made it less useful. But its flexibility and grace have kept it on our business cards and movie posters.
And…?
79 AD: The year Vesuvius erupted, an anonymous graffiti artistleft his mark (&) on a Pompeii wall.
820: The calligraphic standard script Carolingian minuscule included the ampersand.
1011: Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Manual included the ampersand in an Old English character set.
1440: An ampersand reportedly appeared on Johannes Gutenberg’s first printing press.
1732: William Caslon, whose namesake typeface is used in the Declaration of Independence, designed “the finest ampersand.”
1795: The first modern usage of “ampersand,” according to Merriam-Webster.
1830s: The word “ampersand” appeared in The Clockmaker, the fictional adventures of Sam Slick—and soon after in English dictionaries.
1899: In the Concise Manual of Typography, the ampersand was defined as “a sign interchangeable with the conjunction ‘and.’”
1931: Legendary designer Eric Gill (of Gill Sans fame) argued for the widespread use of the ampersand in An Essay on Typography.
1953: Designer and typographer Jan Tschichold published A Brief History of the Ampersand.
Do you really need to know more about the ampersand? Then go to https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1641608/