A singular stroke of eloquence: Tristram Shandy’s typography

Abstract

Between 1759 and 1767 Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy presented the reader with four major typographical oddities: two black pages, a hand-marbled coloured leaf, a series of squiggly woodcuts, and a woodcut depicting a flourish. This article describes the technical difficulties these non-verbal textual elements present to publishers of Sterne’s masterpiece, and argues that they are interconnected.