He kidnaps Mycroft Next and steals his Prose Portal, using it to enter stolen original manuscripts of such classic tales as Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre, with the aim of extracting characters from them and holding them to ransom.
He allows Jack Schitt to have his way at first and seemingly faces up poorly to higher authority, but in Something Rotten he invents an elaborate cover story for Thursday after her return.
After her husband retires, the couple moved into Thornfield Hall in the novel Jane Eyre, where they manage the house, carefully avoiding any appearances in the narrative.
After much agonising over whether to tell the truth, Landen finally gave evidence to the inquest about Anton's error, which drove a wedge between him and Thursday, until the two reconciled during the events of The Eyre Affair.
Cheerful, frequently irreverent almost but (usually) not quite to the point of being irritating and laid-back, he nevertheless has an extremely caring nature and a great deal of wisdom, which serves him well in his chosen vocation.
Some have proved to be important plot devices throughout the series, such as his Prose Portal, which allowed real-world individuals to enter books and the Ovinator, which encourages cooperation.
She was temporarily held hostage within the William Wordsworth poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by Acheron Hades during the events of The Eyre Affair.
During the events of Lost in a Good Book, Landen is eradicated from history by a rogue member of the Chronoguard, acting on behalf of the Goliath Corporation, who wish to blackmail Thursday into returning their operative Jack Schitt.
He was ultimately retrieved by Thursday during the events of Lost in a Good Book, after Goliath arranged to have her husband Landen eradicated from history by the Chronoguard in order to blackmail her.
He loses his cool only rarely; and although he once, seemingly in a fit of depression, considered the possibility of self-sacrifice/suicide, admitting that "battling the undead was never a bowl of cherries," he was in fact trying to trick both Thursday and a Supreme Evil Being.
It was once hinted that he suffers from either lycanthropy or vampirism and requires regular "medication"; without it he will sometimes lose control of himself and exhibit wolflike behavior, such as eating live mice.
Dr. Runcible Spoon (Professor of English Literature at Swindon University) is named after the utensil with which The Owl and the Pussycat dine on "mince and slices of quince" in a nonsense rhyme by Edward Lear.
Detective Inspector Oswald Mandias of Yorkshire CID (the policeman investigating the theft of the Jane Eyre manuscript from the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth) is named after Ozymandias, the eponymous subject of Shelley's 1818 sonnet.
Following the successful intervention of The Great Panjandrum, the clone was demoted, and Thursday was then asked to assume the role, which she accepted, holding the position for around two years before resigning during the events of Something Rotten.
They and Quasimodo help Thursday foil Harris Tweed and his cohorts, and Potternews is finally granted an Internal Plot Readjustment to allow Vernham and his lover to marry happily.
Gran's long life includes many interesting jobs, such as working in many divisions of SpecOps, spending twenty-four hours as a man and ruling as God Emperor of the Universe.
He is the first to contact Thursday by Footnoterphone in Lost in a Good Book, and as head of the JurisFiction legal team defends her at her first hearing in Franz Kafka's The Trial.
Schitt-Hawse is primarily responsible for the eradication from history of Landen Parke-Laine during the events of Lost in a Good Book, in order to blackmail Thursday into retrieving Jack Schitt from inside Poe's The Raven.
Thursday agreed to retrieve Schitt, only for Schitt-Hawse to subsequently imprison her, intending to study her bookjumping ability in order to open up new potential markets for the Goliath Corporation within fiction.
In return for Thursday's assistance, Stiggins helps her win a critical croquet game by providing a number of Neanderthal players to fill gaps on the team.
Cindy is a professional assassin known as the Windowmaker (the first use of that name was due to a typographical error in a newspaper) who has finished off sixty-seven people (sixty-eight if you count Samuel Pring, but she later admits that was a fluke).
After she is hit on the head by a falling piano stool she offers to replace a dying Thursday on her way to the afterlife, knowing she will never leave prison if she survives or be with Spike or their daughter again, and making up partly for her crimes.
An early Booksplorer, Bradshaw now works as an agent for JurisFiction (he is a former Bellman as well) and is considered to be one of their best operatives; his maps, while sometimes incomplete, are a most trusted resource for Bookworld explorers.
Assigned to stay with Thursday in the unpublished novel Caversham Heights during the events of Lost in a Good Book, Randolph and Lola started out as truly generic characters, being sexless, ageless, nameless and with no distinguishing features of any kind.
Although the pair argued constantly, they ultimately realized that they were in love and were instrumental in the reorganization of Caversham Heights into a book where characters from other novels could take holidays away from the rather repetitious nature of their roles.
During his time there, he became romantically involved with Lady Emma Hamilton and found a new decisiveness within himself, one that he originally planned to take back into his play and rewrite it from within, portraying himself as a much more dynamic character.
While he is an infant during the chronology of the novels, Friday later joins SO-12, the Chronoguard, rising to become head of the department and, according to his grandfather, Colonel Next, a time manipulator of extraordinary skill.
In First Among Sequels, Friday is apparently a lazy, slovenly adolescent whom Thursday calls a "tedious teenage cliché: grunting, sighing at any request, and staying in bed until past midday."
A thirteenth-century prophet from Swindon, St Zvlkx's sixth Revealment was a prediction of his own resurrection in 1988, which Joffy Next prepares for by learning Old English to communicate with the saint.
Jenny never actually makes an appearance during the novel, and is later revealed to be nonexistent, placed in Thursday's mind in an act of vengeance by Aornis Hades.