Darius[]
Darius is a reader with a silver tongue of his own, in Capricorn's service during Inkheart. He stumbles a lot due to the nervousness when he is in Capricorn's service, and that often results in defects in the read-out people, including Theresa Folchart loosing her voice, Cockerell's limp, and Flatnose's flattened face.
However, without the pressure of Capricorn, Darius reads well. He eventually suceeds reading both himself and Elinor into Inkheart after Elinor insists and pleads him hundreds of thousands of times to read him in. As Elinor says it in chapter 32 of Inkdeath, "Darius read wonderfully, although in his mouth the words sounded very different from the way Mortimer would have read them (and of course very different again from the voice of Orpheus, that defiler of books). Perhaps Darius's art was most like Meggie's. He read with the innocence of a child, and it semmed to Elinor as if, for the first time, she saw the boy he had once been - a thin, bespectacled boy who loved books as passionately as she did, but with the difference that for him the pages came to life. Darius's voice was not as full and beautiful as Mortimer's, nor did it have the enthusiasm that lent Orpheus's voice its power. No, Darius took the words on his tongue as carefully as if they might break apart there, might lose their meaning if they were spoken in a too loud and firm tone. All the sadness of the world lay in Darius's voice: the magic of the weak, the quiet and cautious, and their knkowledge of the pitiless minds of the strong... (...) Darius's tongue didn't stumble once - perhaps because this time not fear but love made him read. He opened the door between the letters on the page so gently that Elinor felt as if they were stealing into Fenoglio's world like two children slipping into a forbidden room."
Darius stays close with Elinor in the beginning of Inkdeath still, even before he reads them into Inkheart, helping Elinor purchase books. Elinor even gets Darius a gift - a too big bathrobe with Darius treasures. Darius soon turns into the friend Elinor needs who isn't a book. When Elinor is grouchy however, Darius takes her sharp words like a beating, not flinching once but obediently keeping up with work. He is a very mild man, wearing glasses and timid.