Manicule

The manicule, ☞, is a typographic mark with the appearance of a hand with its index finger extending in a pointing gesture. Originally used for handwritten marginal notes, it later came to be used in printed works to draw the reader's attention to important text. Though once widespread, it is rarely used today, except as an occasional archaic novelty or on informal directional signs.

Throughout its history, the mark has been referred to by a variety of names. When William H. Sherman wrote the first dedicated study of the symbol in his 2005 paper, "Towards a History of the Manicule", he used the term manicule. It is derived from the Latin root manicula, meaning "little hand". Cognates of the term were common in Romance languages, but the English loanword manicule was largely restricted to manuscript scholarship prior to Sherman's paper. Sherman explains his decision not to use one of the various English terms, because manicule describes the mark itself while many of the other terms describe one of its various functions. For example, Sherman writes that "fist has its origins in printers’ slang and should properly be restricted to the products of the printing press."

Sherman lists 14 further names used for the symbol. Three of the names are likely conflations with other terms: pilcrow, maniple, and indicule. The pilcrow is the paragraph mark, ¶. Maniple, according to literature scholar Theresa M. Krier, is either a misapplication of maniple, the cloth used by priests during Mass, or it is a combination of manicule with manciple. Sherman writes that indicule is likely a combination of indicator with manicule. He then lists the Latin indicationum and ten English terms for the manicule:

The symbol began as a form of marginalia that developed alongside books in their now-standard codex form. One of the earliest forms of marginal commentary was scholia, or written notes in the margins of text, typically provided by the scribe who created the handwritten manuscript copy. Three ancient Greek homeric scholars—Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace—who were all librarians at the Library of Alexandria, successively developed a system of symbols to be used in the margins of Homer's poetry. Named after the obelus, which evolved into the modern dagger †, this system of marking up a text with a set of symbols for scholarly commentary became known as obelism. Among these Aristarchian symbols, the ancora, an anchor-shaped pointer ⸔ or ⸕, was used to draw attention to a passage.

The codex format for texts, introduced in the 4th century AD, was better suited to marginal notation than the continuous scrolls used in antiquity. While the pages on a scroll are written on the same long length of papyrus or parchment, a codex has physically separate pages bound at one edge. Their format is very similar to a modern book, although using vellum or parchment made from animal hides instead of paper.

In Europe, note-taking by readers and the related usage of the manicule peaked in the Renaissance. It is difficult to say when the manicule first appeared because its usage was heavily tied to the act of reading. Renaissance owners of expensive manuscripts and of early printed books often extensively annotated the books they owned. Many manuscripts and printed books from the period contain personal systems of marginal symbols and notes written by the book's reader, and some even have hand-written legends for the symbols and entire indices appended to the book.

The oldest book known to contain a manicule is the 1086 land survey, Domesday Book, but the age of the annotation is unknown and may date to later than the 11th century. Domesday Book uses a range of symbols for marginal annotations including the manicule and other marks such as daggers. Though the manicule was frequently used for centuries to annotate books by both copyists and readers, there was little written about the mark itself. Printer John Johnson's 1824 guide and history on typography, Typographia, Or The Printers' Instructor, lays out the book's various reference marks including the dagger, manicule, and asterisk as reference symbols that "in most instances explain themselves."

Manicules appeared in 12th century handwritten manuscripts in Spain, and became common in 14th and 15th-century Italian manuscript. Some were as simple as "two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest sketch of a pointing hand" and thus quick to draw, while others were playful and elaborate, with shading and artful cuffs. Some have fingers lengthened and bent to point deep into the text. For example, a fourteenth-century manuscript of Cicero's Paradoxa Stoicorum includes manicules, that variously stretch out fingernails, bend their fingers to cover the full length of the page, are an octopus, or wield a snake.