Lynne Truss was on her way to deliver a lecture at the British Library recently when she was reminded yet again that a tremendous gap exists between her natural obsessions and those of other people.
"Punctuation," Ms. Truss replied, when her taxi driver asked what she planned to talk about. But the word didn't compute; he heard something less weird in his head. "Ooh, in that case," he replied, "I better get you there on time!"
So it has been a shock to the rarefied system of Ms. Truss, 48, that her book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," has become this year's surprise No. 1 best seller here. Among the legions of the surprised are the executives at her publishing house, Profile Books, who ordered a modest initial printing of 15,000 books, but now have 510,000 in print; and Ms. Truss's friends and family.
"When I was writing it, everybody thought it was commercial suicide to spend any time at all -- even just four or five months -- on it because obviously it wouldn't sell," Ms. Truss said in an interview.
...
As for its title, it comes from a joke that begins, "A panda walks into a cafe."
The panda orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda."
Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Editor's Note: "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" will not be available until April. If you find a copy in the U.K., send please it our way.
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