Keith Houston’s Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, published last month, is the first comprehensive history of emoji. As its back cover claims, the book “tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.”
Shigetaka Kurita is credited as the inventor of emoji, as he designed a set of pictograms for the Japanese telecom firm Docomo in 1999. But, as Houston explains, Kurita had several predecessors: similar icons were created for a Sharp PDA in 1988, and for a Pioneer cellphone in 1997.
Face with Tears of Joy is not the first book to cover the history of emoji: The Story of Emoji, by Gavin Lucas, was published almost a decade earlier. (Houston’s book doesn’t mention Lucas at all.) With almost fifty pages of notes, Face with Tears of Joy is more detailed than The Story of Emoji, though The Story of Emoji is significant as it includes an interview with Kurita.
Shigetaka Kurita is credited as the inventor of emoji, as he designed a set of pictograms for the Japanese telecom firm Docomo in 1999. But, as Houston explains, Kurita had several predecessors: similar icons were created for a Sharp PDA in 1988, and for a Pioneer cellphone in 1997.
Face with Tears of Joy is not the first book to cover the history of emoji: The Story of Emoji, by Gavin Lucas, was published almost a decade earlier. (Houston’s book doesn’t mention Lucas at all.) With almost fifty pages of notes, Face with Tears of Joy is more detailed than The Story of Emoji, though The Story of Emoji is significant as it includes an interview with Kurita.
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