Two which can still be seen today are the manicule (☛) and the pilcrow (¶), while the interrobang (‽) seems to have made some headway.

Apparently, in preparing the samples for her "readability" surveys, informally prepared brochures taken from social service agencies were one of the primary sources. J'ai eu un vrai plaisir à lire SHADY CHARACTERS - un peu d'histoire, un peu d'anecdotes, c'est super quand l'on peut lire un livre et avoir vraiment l'impression d'apprendre quelques choses!

The physiological aspect probably has to do with the regularized eye movement in fully justified text vs. As Shady Characters goes on to explain, the layout of words in books (and in scrolls before) were determined to need extra marks that would assist in the understanding of the text. Non-English editions Shady Characters is also available in Polish (as Ciemne typki), published by Karakter, and in Chinese complex characters (as 英語符號趣味學), published by Rye Field Publications. The tone Houston took toward early Christianity was not to my taste, but it’s a secular book, so I didn’t really expect anything else, and to be fair, a lot of the “Christianity” he referenced was not all that Christian in nature.

The beginning of the book actually has a part that explains who each character is and their animal “form. Whole he occasionally gives examples of usage, this isn't a grammar or usage book, so if you are looking for that look elsewhere. Founded in 1998 by (now author) Kimberly Pauley as a basic stopover for people looking for information on young adult books, YABC has since evolved into one of the largest professional book recommendation sites targeted towards tween and teen readers. There are many surprises and amusing facts - such as the large variety of dashes, and how many of these ornate marks are due to scribes being lazy. I note that I supervised a book-oriented typesetting service in San Francisco (doing work for major publishers) during the transition from dedicated phototypesetting machines to "desk top publishing.However, as the author Keith Houston discovered in the afterword, this book is really more of an exploration of the development of written language and its stylizing and the evolution of printing. Sure, it's a way of getting a lot of 'facts' down on a page - some of those facts might even be interesting - but you can do that in fiction too; oftentimes much better. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to remember everyone, but the author does a good job of reminding you who they are and eventually, I didn’t need reminding at all.