Is this a book for you? That depends on your point of view. It hit the USA market with a bang in 2004 and has not looked back since. The year before, one of the breakout surprises was Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which published in the UK in November 2003 with a 15,000 print run, and had sold 500,000 copies by Christmas. For example, last year Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You To Know About and Marley and Me came from nowhere to make huge sales. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in 'Video's sold here'.Įvery now and then a book comes along, seemingly from out of the blue, and catches the public's interest. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! Of course they don't! They laugh at books like those! Eats, Shoots and Leaves adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes: send letters back with the punctuation corrected. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Competition rules remind us: 'The judges decision is final.' Now, many punctuation guides already exist explaining the principles of the apostrophe the comma the semi-colon. Eats, shoots and leaves.' We see signs in shops every day for 'Banana's' and even 'Gateaux's'. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter.

Eats shoots and leaves author