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Both books of Daniel O'Malley's series "The Rook Files" that I've read so far have a (to me) grating habit of omitting an opening punctuation mark if it would be the first character in a major subsection of the text. Said initial characters are always extra-large letters. I suspect the thought process was that the quotation mark would be wrong to put there by itself. And, if it was added alongside the letter, then there would be two large characters. Still, I find it annoying. The orthography is wrong.

Example from the start of The Rook's Chapter 3 (click for uncompressed version). While this is from a chapter start, it also occurs for intra-chapter scene breaks (example).

text starts with no opening quotation mark, "My" with the M being large, and continues "name is Myfanwy" followed by a closing quotation mark.

Is this practice precedented? For example from the days when typesetting involved literal type, and thus setting up an extra-large quotation mark would have been difficult?

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    FWIW, many ebooks with drop-caps omit quotation marks in this way.  (Though I'm not clear whether they do it to match print books, or because it’s assumed to be The Right Way™, or just out of habit.)  And yes, you’re not the only one who finds it annoying! Commented yesterday
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    That XKCD link needs a content warning! Commented yesterday

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Robert Bringhurst addresses this question:

Quotation marks have a long scribal history as editorial signs added after the fact to other people’s texts, but they did not come into routine typographic use until late in the sixteenth century. Then, because they interfered with established habits for positioning large initials, they were commonly omitted from the openings of texts. Some style books still prescribe this concession to convenience as a fixed procedural rule. But digital typography makes it simple to control the size and placement of the opening quotation mark, whether or not the text begins with a versal.† For the reader’s sake, it should be there.

Robert Bringhurst (2004). The Elements of Typographic Style, third edition, page 64. Hartley & Marks.

† A versal is “a special style of ornate capital letter used at the beginning of a verse or paragraph” (OED).

When using moveable type, it was expensive to combine quotation marks with a versal, because the versal needs to be left-aligned, pushing the quotation mark into the margin, which required more complex page arrangements, taking longer to set. Omitting the quotation mark saved time and money. However, as Bringhurst says, this consideration ought not to apply when using digital typography. Bringhurst gives two examples combining quotation marks with versals:

Caption reads “Passages from the Song of Songs, set in Aldus 10/12 × 10 RR. Elevated cap: Castellar 54 pt. Drop caps: Aldus 42 pt, mortised line by line.” In the first example, the versal is “N” and this pushes the quotation mark (a guillemet) into the left margin, but in the second example, the versal is “A” and there is room to tuck in the quotation mark in the negative space above left of versal.

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  • Seems like using the A as an example is a bit of a cop out. The shape of the letter naturally carves out a space for the quotation mark. Where would it go if the versal was an R? Commented yesterday
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    @TJM Bringhurst's two examples show different solutions to the problem, depending on the shape of the versal. Commented yesterday
  • Yes, but they also use different types of quotation marks, which muddles things. Commented yesterday
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    @TJM: There’s a tradeoff between showing all possible combinations, and covering more variety. Bringhurst generally errs on the side of terseness, and covers an astounding amount of material very well in a fairly slim book. Commented yesterday

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