Product #4999-34s “Shrubquote”

Deep in the steamy jungles of the antebellum Midwest, a 10-pound baby was born in a generic log cabin. The day before, a thunderstorm had rippled across the steppes, a sign of future fortune. And this child, one John Chapstick, would one day grow up to become a living legend. At the tender age of 14, he set out with a bindle o’er his shoulder and a tear in his eye. Bidding farewell to his wife and 7 kids, he trekked across the great plains to spread the message passed down to him by his grandpappy.

But what was the message he spread so well? Way back in 1846, when Johnny’s pappy and two older brothers went off to fight in La Guerra De ’47, he (being a child of 8) stayed home with his mother, his 43 sisters, and his grandparents. When Johnny asked his grandpa why daddy wouldn’t be comin’ home in time for his birthday, the answer was cryptic at best: “’cause they don’t know no spellin’, boy.”

Since that fateful day, Johnny swooped and hollered, hooted at scholars, flim-flammed and blim-blammed, all in the vein hope that by teaching others the importance of good spelling, he could end all wars forever. City by city, he taught the downtrodden miners and schoolmarms, the rich and the poor, the fat and the obese. He showed the masses how to avoid comma splices, the value of a well-drawn dollar sign, and the importance of recognizing diacritical marks. Where Johnny sat his head, the seeds of conjugation took root, springing forth a mighty forest of punctuation.

Johnny loved typography, and through it, people. And the people loved Johnny, whom they affectionately nicknamed “Johnny Ampersand.”

Johnny Ampersand, age 20.

What he couldn’t fit in his 40-volume typographic epic, he would bring directly to the people. Up on a soapbox for ten hours a day, he’d preach and preen, croon and scream, until there wasn’t an ignorant soul this side of St. Louis who hadn’t heard (or could ham-handedly sing) the Ballad of Johnny Ampersand:

Way back in the land of slime,
When space was empty, void of time,
There was a man who took a stand,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

Rucksack hangin’ ’cross his back,
He left his home to take a crack
At teaching marks right off the rack,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

His brow was heavy, toes uncurled
To the masses, pages furled.
He tried so hard to hold the world,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

A master marketer of hype,
The man taught all the world to type.
Unscathed by bath, his clothes were ripe,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

With him at helm, we won’t despair;
Not under his wrathful stare.
He won the west and fought a bear,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

Then one day he jumped the shark,
Thought he’d kill the question mark.
They found him raving, mad as stark,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

As mice and men of knowledge learned,
His work was scoffed at, books were burned.
A platitude of secrets churned,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

Pen in hand and shoe on foot,
Climbed down chimneys full o’ soot,
Lost his mind and grew the brand,
Good ol’ Johnny Ampersand.

Johnny grew to hate that nickname and sued anyone who used it. As the years rolled on, he gave up his dreams and became very reclusive and erratic. He shot passenger pigeons (ectopistes migratorius) for sustenance, and was reported to have laughed coldly as the last of the specie went extinct in 1914. This led many to believe that he had indeed lost his mind, and that the ballad was a self-fulfilling prophesy. When confronted by psychologists and family, he admitted to hallucinating many conversations with Zizzi, a Micronesian deity who resembles a small tree. In 1918, he became the first human to succumb to typography poisoning during wartime.

The cover of Johnny’s Autobiography, “Treemaster and Diacritics: Refuting the Ellipsis...”

Roboshrub Inc. wouldn’t be half the company it is today without Mr. Ampersand’s subtle artistic influences. That vending machine in the lobby? Designed entirely from Ampersand’s Semicolon Aesthetics. The bathroom layout, down to the red bonsai pots? Explained in painstaking detail in Guillemet or Chevron: A Comparative Study of Angled Quotes. That big tilde over the security desk? Need I say more?!

Long considered the unofficial father of Unicode, Roboshrub Inc. is proud to announce that in honor of what would’ve been John Chapstick’s 168^th birthday, we’re unrolling a formerly banned project (not the bad kind of banned. The fun kind). Throw your graduation caps and instruction manuals in the air, and give it up for the Roboshrub Inc. Typographic Memorial Tag Team!

Our new product, Shrubquote, builds on a nonfunctional device Chapstick touched on in chapter 12 of 450 Uses of the Hyphen. The device was originally supposed to convert plain-jane punctuation into spiced-up doodads. We’ve achieved all that, within an acceptable margin of the edges.

Shrubquote successfully converts boring old quotation marks into their curly unseen cousins, making your unseemly “dumb quotes” into socially-acceptable “smart quotes.” This was extremely important to Chapstick, and as his spiritual heirs, it’s important to us, too. Build 202 correctly ignores HTML tags, works (semi)accurately on single quotes, and can convert quotes to their actual curly characters or their cumbersome Unicode equivalent. We hope you continue to buy Roboshrub Inc. brand products, valued at $0.00 per pound. Some users experienced excessive punctuation as a result of this innovative and illustrious product. Consult psychic before use.