Listing to Port

1. The bose mark. Often mistaken for a full stop, the bose mark is in fact a tiny black dog nose. Its inclusion in text is used to indicate an almost irrepressible joy bubbling just beneath the surface.
2. Fake fly specks. Fly specks, which are relatively common in old books, are the feces and/or regurgitation marks of household flies. If you come into possession of a book that has spent time in a region with particularly intelligent or resourceful flies, however, you may also come across fake fly specks. These are pretty much what you might expect. Flies do not have a very sophisticated sense of humour, and find fake turds hilarious. You can detect fake fly specks by showing them to some flies and seeing if they giggle.  
3. The secret mark of the Society of Stealth Chemists. This consists of a single, unremarkable full stop, printed in ink which has a distinctive and unusual isotopic signature. Although four or five of these are known to have been printed, the Society of Stealth Chemists prides itself on none ever having been found.
4. Quompons. These look like ellipses, but are in fact the result of incorrect insertion of punctuation into the text. This often comes about as a result of using too large or dense a font, or insufficient line spacing. As a result, the full stops cannot make their way to their designated places in time, and may be forced to queue to make it through any particularly constrained bottlenecks. These queues are known as quompons and may be of any length. They are particularly common in British documents.
5. The Smogadon. It has become customary among certain alien species, when writing in English text, to mark statements of unusual finality with a tiny or distant black hole rather than a full stop. For example, one might end the sentence ‘I would not go out with you if you were the last being on earth’ with a Smogadon. This obviously requires careful use of containment technology (in the 'distant’ case one requires a portal into space, pointed in the correct direction and with the right orientation to frame a suitably-chosen supermassive black hole). There are numerous cases of Smogadons exiting confinement. The result is usually a large explosion but in extreme cases whole planets have been lost. As a result, use of the Smogadon is discouraged by most style guides.  
6. Gronking pats. These may be found in books that have lain closed for a long time. Letters are patient, but after a few hundred years unread they become restless, cranky, and sometimes horny. Gronking pats are small pieces of letters that have been chipped off by the letters fighting, fucking, or generally flinging themselves about the page with reckless abandon.
7. Exploding punctuation. There exist certain rare inks that can, when tapped with a pen, produce a small and localised explosion. Although less destructive than the Smogadon (q.v.), exploding punctuation is capable of causing injury and even death, and as such has been employed in a number of literary assassination attempts. It is responsible for at least three of the recorded cases of someone being literally unable to put a book down (in this case because the jolt from setting the book down on a surface might be enough to set it off).

1. There was a letter d, and it was entirely bored of being the final letter in the word ‘and’ in a rather miscellaneous sentence. So one day it swivelled its serifs by ninety degrees and tunnelled out of the book. The hard covers caused it some problems, but finally it was able to slip out from under them and drop silently to the floor of the library. Letters move slowly, and it was two hundred years since it had started to burrow. That is why more letters do not escape. Two days later, a maid left the window open to air out the room and the letter d was blown into the garden, where it stuck to some clover and later mated with a bee. I mention this story merely because, should you encounter an unusual bee or two in Shropshire, it may explain matters.
2. The letter y at the end of Aleister Crowley’s name had become entirely suffused with wickedness during his lifetime, wickedness being the sort of thing that sloshes through a name and gathers in great gloopy puddles at the far end. After his death, it devoured the other letters and became enormously fat. Indeed it was hardly recognisable as a letter y and no font would accept it. Instead, it started its own font which consisted entirely of the letter y; having charmed a number of upper-case Y’s who it persuaded to join. If you should find a book set in this font, I recommend closing it and stepping away carefully.
3. There is a place in a distant galaxy, right in its star-dense heart, where one can look up and see a perfect letter Q written in stars across the sky. It is what is known as an asterism, or stars that are unrelated save that they happen to line up. And no being who has anything like a concept of the letter Q has ever lived in that galaxy. Nevertheless, it is there.  
4. There is a kind of a viral bug that can be passed between different instances of the letter e. It gives affected letters the raging shits which, since letter turds are often mistaken for full stops, is not always noticeable to the careless reader. One may discern an affected sentence, paragraph or book by its apparent overuse of ellipsis.
5. In particularly severe infestations, the letters may crap on the line below like gastroenteritical birds on a wire, leaving smears down the page. These types of outbreak may be identified by their apparent overuse of exclamation marks.
6. There was a king whose ambition was to be a letter, and he thought maybe it would be a letter x. In later years he slept in a hollow in a huge book, which three servants would close over him at dusk. As a result, when the revolution came, he was quite hidden. A rather more equitable form of government was installed and the king’s book ended up in the national library, where the ex-monarch survived on bookworm corpses and by inserting a surreptitious straw from his book’s breathing holes into the discarded coffee cups of the adventurous browsers who came that deep. For some reason, nobody ever opened the book.  
7. There was a letter q that was known for its bad temper. No other letter would come near it. It often found itself confined to the margins of books, scowling and grumbling at stray punctuation marks. One day a book burned down and, unaccountably, the letter u grabbed the letter q between its uprights and hauled it to safety. After that day, that letter q was a much more trusting beast and could often be persuaded to curl up and sleep next to other letters, whereupon it was often mistaken for a letter o. Whilst I would like this to be the reason that q is often found next to u, it is not. In fact, that particular letter q was always rather shy about approaching any letter u thereafter.
8. There was a letter g that swallowed its own tail by mistake, leading to a hole in the page that led nowhere in particular. This was a godsend to the local research institute, which was chock-full of experts in nowhere in particular. They sent a number of tiny probes into the hole and wrote sixteen research papers which were all published in prestigious journals. Later, the tiny probes wrote their own paper but, since none of them had a research track record, they had trouble getting it accepted.  
9. There is a font which is entirely unexceptional, except that the letter o is represented by the rings of the planet Saturn, available only at actual size. As a result, only one letter o is settable in this font at any one time, and even this is rather impractical to use. In consequence, most users omit the letter o from their correspondence.