This is a question only a pedant could love, but what better place to bring it?
I have always been super-conscious of punctuation and spelling mistakes, especially extra spaces. With proportional spacing, sometimes those are hard to spot.
Examples:
Where is the store ? (space before question mark)
Today is the first ; nay , the last , day of your life . (unnecessary spaces before each punctuation)
This isn’t the style now. In modern commercial publications (books, mags, newspapers) these almost never occur. But I was looking over a magazine from 1868, The Overland Monthly, and spotted a consistency in the Railroad article – all semicolons, question marks and exclamation marks were preceded by a space, but commas and periods were not.
Was this the way punctuation worked in the 19th Century? Or is this just a bastard document and not representative of the period?
I have quite a few 19th century books and I don’t recall the use of spaces before punctuation in any of them. I’m not sure any of them are as old as 1868 however. I’d have to check.
I’m guessing the space had to do with the fact that the punctuation could get blurry and run into the word after enough ink-overs on old-fashioned had-set presses. Leave a space, and the punctuation was more distinct.
Also, typewriters usually had punctuation on a key that struck center, just like each letter did. The result was that the punctuation looked a little bit separated from the last word. That was why a lot of people thought typing looked better if you had two spaces before each sentence-- it made the punctuation that finished a sentence even closer to that sentence than to the following one, by comparison.
Wikipedia has a copy of the Declaration of Independence from 1823. It’s not consistent, but there are MANY cases of space before punctuation. Curious that I never noticed it before.
Most British printed works until just after the Second World War kept a space before ? or !, as do I. It’s just better.
Spacing before the common punctuation marks occurred, but mainly in arty fiction publishers ( think Bloomsbury ), the same sort of publishers who fancied curled back 'f’s or odd looking 's’s, particularly in poetry.
Some even had spaces after or before " or ', as in: " That’s fine. " said the colonel, " Deacon Chalmers said to me ’ Colonel, the shay is laid-up. ’ "
From Wikipedia, History of sentence spacing: With the advent of the typewriter in the late 19th century, French and English typists adopted approximations of standard spacing practices to fit the limitations of the typewriter itself. French typists used a single space between sentences, consistent with the typeset French spacing technique, whereas English typists used a double space.
French spacing inserted spaces around most punctuation marks, but single-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.*
English spacing removed spaces around most punctuation marks, but double-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.*
These approximations were taught and used as the standard typing techniques in French and English-speaking countries. For example, T. S. Eliot typed rather than wrote the manuscript for his classic The Waste Land between 1920 and 1922, and used only English spacing throughout: double-spaced sentences
I forgot to mention that the French version of the Canadian statutes i was looking at did not have the spaces before colons and semi-colons. That’s consistent with the Wikipedia article.
Typing conventions have nothing to do with printing conventions. It was standard in the U.S. to use two spaces after sentences on all manuscripts, but no one in the 20th century would ever allow that in the finished typeset work.