It’s the same old story.

We invented Something first, and then we had to supplement it with Nothing.

Today, reading is a breeze and it’s all the empty space around characters that lets this breeze through. Commas, apostrophes, dashes require little ink, but still surround themselves with generous canvases. Lowercase letters are often content with occupying very little of the space provided. And then there’s pure whitespace too, vast and uninked: room in between rows of letters, pauses flanking words, and the most lavish convention this side of Page intentionally left blank — tens of thousands of pixels off-duty, creating breathing room in between paragraphs. (Just look around, right here on this page.)

But all that whitespace did not appear overnight, and travelling back through thousands of years of history provides clues on how we went from then to now.

Early on, reading text was like driving Interstate 5 through L.A. on a Friday night. Bowl-to-bowl traffic, zero punctuation, no lowercase letter shapes to help the eye commute. Reading was hard work — so hard, indeed, that one would usually read out loud, and only in that way realize where to pause, where to breathe, and where to stop.

One of the first on the scene — before the rest of punctuation made their figurative and literal mark — was the pilcrow, inserted in between yet-shapeless paragraphs, still figuring out its final shape.

As, throughout the ages, we started recognizing the value of whitespace, inventing the technology necessary to support it, and learning how to reduce the cost of paper, pilcrows often found themselves dropped to a new line.

Eventually, with the tight deadlines and mechanized print taking over manual lettering, rubricators slowly started running out of time to ink in all those pilcrows… and it turned out that the invention of a new line and the room reserved to hold pilcrows were in and of themselves enough of an indication of a new paragraph.

And so the pilcrow slowly disappeared, the indentation at the beginning of a paragraph sticking around as its afterimage.

Indented paragraphs is something you can still see in most of today’s books. Other places — Medium included — prefer no indentation between paragraphs, but generous space in between.

The pilcrow all but disappeared in common use, but typography aficionados kept its spirit alive.

I have trouble remembering where I first met the pilcrow, but I am guessing it must have been one of two places: either pages of the often typographically delightful Wired Magazine, or as a button in my word processor’s toolbar. That button summoned pilcrows and typography’s other “dark matter” — but only for a moment, a typographical user interface rather than actual printed output. (Every time I clicked it, I thought of The sixth sense’s “I see dead people.”)

So I’ve learned about the pilcrow, but it doesn’t mean I immediately fell in love with it.

Here’s the problem: it’s hard to defend pilcrows for some of the same reasons it’s tough to be a fan of the interrobang; both characters have weirdly hostile names but, more importantly, both are often simply doggone ugly.

Sure, “ampersand” as a word comes across as a rejected electricity unit, but at least some ampersands are truly works of art. “Interpunct” was lucky enough to have been domesticated as a “middle dot” or even “mid dot,” and it’s so cute I can’t help but use it as a nose in my smileys. Dagger, caret, obelus? Hells yeah. Super weird names, but please, invite them and their extended families.

Pilcrow, on the other hand… First, it’s named like a villain in an Ian Fleming novel. Second, I can’t help but think that even some of the most wonderful pilcrows from the designers at Hoefler & Co. seem like they never quite belong (let alone those in other fonts).

Here’s some examples I found in my Font Book of ampersands (yeah) and same-font pilcrows (bleh):

And yet, I wanted to see pilcrows on Medium.

Part of the reason was the respect I hold for typography’s rich history. Sticking to my city metaphors, I look at typography the way I look at New York — young skyscrapers casting shadows on buildings from 1850s — or San Francisco, where one can spot a cable car conquering a hill side by side with a Tesla Model S. Or even my current MacBook, just upgraded to Mac OS X Yosemite, where modern iOS-like design sensibilities find themselves right next to vintage Mac conventions, and a window with a command-line terminal harking back to old typewriters.

It’s even better for those interested in type. Learn just a bit about modern typography’s heritage, and it’s hard to look at some stories on Medium — or Internet in general — and not get a whiplash from jumping back and forth centuries in time. Ancient two-storey “a” right next to a single-storey italic “a” from 1500s; a full stop that was hanging out with Jesus a few words after a much younger comma; a 20th-century underline drawn right below 21st-century emoji.

I said “zero punctuation” above as a bit of foreshadowing. Zero, another character standing for nothing, also had an interesting career. It was originally created to fill out a space, since putting more than one empty box side by side is very confusing (imagine distinguishing between 1000 and 1000000000 before zeroes became visible). Later, however, zero evolved into a wonderful and powerful concept of a Mathematical Nothing.

Pilcrow was less lucky. The idea of a paragraph and the symbol representing it grew apart, and while we still believe in the former (even tweets support paragraphs), the latter slowly faded away.

Except, not quite. History is great for history lessons (Keith Houston recently wrote the meticulously researched account of the pilcrow’s rise and fall in three amazing parts), but I also wanted pilcrows on Medium because we needed pilcrows on Medium. There are places where we have to summarize a story — in collection listings and in emails — and simply don’t have much room for a spacious paragraph break.

Sure, we could show just one or two lines then, but that seemed unfair to stories which started slowly and carefully. And concatenating sentences as if they belonged to one paragraph seemed wholly inappropriate.

So we took Nothing away, and brought Something back. As of last week, once in awhile, you will encounter a strange character here on Medium. It will look like a mirrored P with twin stems. It’s not a very common sight, and it won’t ever be. And we’re not too happy with it yet, as we had to pick it from a different font and mix and match… eventually, we might even draw our own one just as we want to do with some of the awful-looking Unicode smileys.

But that’s all in the future. Right now, it’s a small wonderful miracle to talk about pilcrows — that ancient typographical convention — having a future. And that makes me happy.

So if you stumble upon one during your Medium reading and writing, make sure to say “hi.”

It’s been a while.

❦

In the Medium typography series, we previously covered underlines, hanging quotes, and Whitespace. Are we missing something interesting? Want to know more? Email us at typography@medium.com.