Ever since that day in the late 1950s when entrepreneur Charles Lazarus named his second store Toys “Я” Us (the first, which specialized in kids’ furniture, was called Children’s Bargain Town), those who wrote about him struggled with that backwards R. You just couldn’t reproduce it in most newspapers and magazines, and in fact the official company name in SEC documents is “Toys R Us Inc.”
But nowadays, thanks to the magic of html, it’s easy to write an Я! I’m sure many others figured this out years ago, but I saw Steven Wells do it in the Guardian sportblog today, and was inspired. After a little searching, I found that he was probably using a character from the Cyrillic alphabet. To get it, you just type an ampersand followed, with no space, by #1071;
