On the Mark is a ground-breaking history of punctuation stretching from the ancient past to the rise of the emoji, the birth of the printing press and the death of the Oxford Comma.

This is the first global history of punctuation to tell the story of the marks that give voice to the written word, turning words into meaningful language and inflecting them with nuance and tone.

Subtitled A History of Punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the Emoticon, the book is a fascinating odyssey through time and place for language lovers.

Florence Hazrat is a researcher and writer, and a world expert on the history and culture of punctuation. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she has appeared on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, and writes the Substack Mind the Gap.

Her first book, An Admiral Point, a cultural history of the exclamation mark, was published in 2022.