'Nounfish,' explained Perkins. 'They swim the outer banks of the Text Sea, hoping to attract and devour stray nouns eager to start an embryonic sentence.'

He turned the page to reveal a picture of a small maggot.

'A bookworm?' I suggested, having seen these before at my Uncle Mycroft's workshop.

'Indeed,' replied Perkins. 'Not strictly a pest and actually quite necessary to the existence of the BookWorld. They take words and expel alternative meanings like a hot radiator. I think earthworms are the nearest equivalent in the Outland. They aerate the soil, yes?'

I nodded.

'Bookworms do the same job down here. "Without them, words would have one meaning, and meanings would have one word. They live in thesauri but their benefit is felt throughout fiction.'

'So why are they considered a pest?'

'Useful, but not without their drawbacks. Get too many bookworms in your novel and the language becomes almost unbearably flowery.'

'I've read books like that,' I confessed.

He turned the page and I recognised the grammasites that had swarmed through the Well earlier.

'Verbisoid,' he said with a sigh, 'to be destroyed without mercy. Once the Verbisoid extracts the verb from a sentence it generally collapses; do that once too often and the whole narrative falls apart like a bread roll in a rainstorm.'

'Why do they wear waistcoats and stripy socks?'

'To keep warm, I should imagine.'

'What's this?' I asked as he turned the page again. 'Another verbinator?'

'Well, kind of,' replied Perkins. 'This is a Converbilator. It actually creates verbs out of nouns and other words. Mostly by appending ize or ise but sometimes just by a direct conversion, such as knife, lunch and question. During a drought they have been known to even create compound verbs such as air-condition, and signpost. Like the bookworms they are necessary – but can't be allowed to get out of hand.'

'Some would say there are too many verbs already,' I commented.

'Those that do,' replied Perkins testily, 'should come and work for Jurisfiction for a bit and try and stop them.'

'What about the mispeling vyrus?' I asked.

'Speltificarious Molesworthian,' murmured Perkins, moving to where a pile of dictionaries were stacked up around a small glass jar. He picked out the container and showed it to me. A thin purple haze seemed to wisp around inside; it reminded me of one of Spike's SEBs.

'This is the larst of the vyrus,' explained Perkins. 'We had to distroy the wrist. It's very powarfull – can u feel it, even through the glas?'

'Unnessary,' I said, testing it out, 'undoutadly, professor, diarhea, nakijima. You're right, it's prety strong, isn't it?'

He replaced the jar bak in the dictosafe.

'Rampant before Agent Johnson's Dictionary in 1744,' commented Perkins. 'Lavinia-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary keep it all in check but we have to be careful. We used to contain any outbreak and offload it in the Molesworth series where no one ever notices. These days we destroy any new vyrus with a battery of dictionaries we keep on the seventeenth floor of the Great Library. But we can't be too careful. Every mispeling you come across has to be reported to the Cat on form S-I2.'