The little row of dots between bosom and eyes.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots to fortify the endangered hero.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of bracketed dots that frees the narrative to return to the heroine.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots that sees the night through.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots that transitions a heroine into a boarding house.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

The three dots of hopelessness, sorrow, and despair.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

From Mocca, 1934.

"The ravages of …"  From Pearson's, 1906.

Joel Burget asked "Why hasn't anyone combined ellipsis / question mark to parallel the interrobang?"  Such a mark actually goes a long way back.  Here's an example from Pearson's magazine, 1909.

We're often asked, "what were you on?" when we decoded the secret meanings to the profuse ellipses in an obscure novel from the 1920s.  (We compiled our surprising findings into Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation.)  Well, the answer isn't so much what we took in but rather what we put on: special eyewear from the year 1623, as described in Uso de los Antoios para Todo Genero de Vistas.  Here's an illustration from the book, showing how the glasses focus upon rows of dots.  Here also is another illustration from the book, rather accurately showing the wearer's view of the world. 

What is the origin of the set of dots we use to indicate an omission from writing?

Prof. Oddfellow has traced the dots back to this unretouched mathematical illustration from 1918, showing how to construct an ellipse using circle arcs.  Note the three dots on the right side of the central line.  Our ellipsis dots are, fittingly, born of the ellipse!

The three sad eyes of the ellipses...
by Gary Barwin

for Craig Conley

The three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost. Three islands. Small songs in a sea that prefers to forget the land. The mouth opens and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said. One world followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of the galaxy. A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen, though perhaps down on the miniscule surface, there are different kinds of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the continuing on. Small black stones in the river of speech. Three tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in between. Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities of the sentence. Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The dark matter music between things. Three brother molecules in a subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most foolish, most likely to wed the princess. An echo of the full stop at the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page, holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.

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Paul Dean writes:

Though we'll soon be sharing more pages of our new book Annotated Ellipses here at Abecedarian, we can't resist quoting the early reviews:

From Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]:

Here's a delightful new book by Craig Conley: Annotated Ellipses.  In it, he takes a page from The Wind Bloweth, a ellipse-filled novel by Donn Byrne, and he explains the hidden story behind all those daffy dots. It's so creative, so funny, and so completely Craig, who also wrote a dictionary of one-letter words and a field guide to identifying unicorns by sound (really!).  We love it!

From Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks:

Very charming. ... It's visual theatre.

From Gary Barwin, author of Seeing Stars:

Fantastic.  Really lovely use and fragmentation/elaboration of the source text, something very allusively numinous and resonant.  The idea of what lies behind the ellipses ... what has been left out, the ellipse as a hole/portal into another world, as .... a 'mark of three,' as three places in an alphabet of symbols/signs/sigils, is fantastic, and very evocative.