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To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Bestsellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thousands of copies of your little book about punctuation sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,” I’m afraid the Spirit would have been sent whiffling off down Clerkenwell Road with the sound of merry, disbelieving laughter ringing in its ears. “Lady Strange,” we would have repeated, chuckling, for hours afterwards. “Honestly, what are these prophetic spirits of old London town coming to these days?” Personally, I clung on to one thing when Eats, Shoots & Leaves began its rush up the charts. Since the rallying cry for the book had been chosen pretty early on, I referred to it continually to steady my nerves and remind myself of my original aspirations—which were certainly plucky but at the same time not the least bit confident of universal appeal. “Sticklers unite!” I had written as this rallying cry. “You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion (and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with).” There you are, then. My hopes for Eats, Shoots & Leaves were bold but bathetic; chirpy but feet-on-the-ground; presumptuous yet significantly parenthetical. My book was aimed at the tiny minority of British people “who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked about with”. When my own mother suggested we print on the front of the book “For the select few,” I was hurt, I admit it; I bit my lip and blinked a tear. Yet I knew what she meant. I am the writer, after all, who once wrote a whole comic novel about Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and expected other people to be interested. Oh yes, I have learned that lesson the hard way. To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Bestsellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thousands of copies of your little book about punctuation sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,” I’m afraid the Spirit would have been sent whiffling off down Clerkenwell Road with the sound of merry, disbelieving laughter ringing in its ears. “Lady Strange,” we would have repeated, chuckling, for hours afterwards. “Honestly, what are these prophetic spirits of old London town coming to these days?” Personally, I clung on to one thing when Eats, Shoots & Leaves began its rush up the charts. Since the rallying cry for the book had been chosen pretty early on, I referred to it continually to steady my nerves and remind myself of my original aspirations—which were certainly plucky but at the same time not the least bit confident of universal appeal. “Sticklers unite!” I had written as this rallying cry. “You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion (and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with).” There you are, then. My hopes for Eats, Shoots & Leaves were bold but bathetic; chirpy but feet-on-the-ground; presumptuous yet significantly parenthetical. My book was aimed at the tiny minority of British people “who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked about with”. When my own mother suggested we print on the front of the book “For the select few,” I was hurt, I admit it; I bit my lip and blinked a tear. Yet I knew what she meant. I am the writer, after all, who once wrote a whole comic novel about Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and expected other people to be interested. Oh yes, I have learned that lesson the hard way. To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Bestsellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thousands of copies .of your little book a;bout punctuation sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in” the House’ of ” Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,” I’m afraid the Spirit would have
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A zero tolerance approach to punctuation