Context: Advertisement in the Times (UK) from July, 1903.

Fancy hyphen.

It seems to be a regular hyphen, albeit with a fairly non-standard design. It might be to match the rest of the font.

"To-night", "To-morrow", with a hyphen, are ye olde spelling variants -- see also "To-day" on the bottom of the 2nd image.

I used to learn this form of double hyphen in school in Austria for dividing words at the end of the line. Don’t know if it is still taught this way.

Florian?

Thanks. I guess in context (spelling conventions) it had to be a hyphen, but I was worried there was some special archaic glyph in the world of hyphens and dashes that I hadn't seen before.

See Arabella. I think it has this hyphen and the en-dash and em-dash. Nothing else.

There's some recent conversation about double hyphens in this thread:
http://typophile.com/node/71089

Great thread. Thanks!

I used to learn this form of double hyphen in school in Austria for dividing words at the end of the line. Don’t know if it is still taught this way.

Same in Italy.

Side note: The typeface around the hyphen is Hermann Ihlenburg's Columbus, circa 1892 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan / ATF. The 1902 italic version for ATF was called "American Italic" (for no obviously good reason).

Cheers,

T