The city of Bologna has more graffiti than any other city in Italy. When I was there last week I noticed just how much writing on the walls there is: as well as graffiti, Bologna’s streets and buildings are covered with a multitude of posters, fliers, banners, and flags…

I was reminded of  Juliet Fleming’s fabulous discussion of Elizabethan wall-writing in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001), where she emphasises that ‘defacement’ can operate ‘as a principle of textual production’, and that graffiti can be understood as something which ‘appears within an intellectual economy that values the utterance of common-places, and tolerates the appearance of writing as a thing among things’ (p. 51).

Commercial dressmaking patterns from previous decades are domestic material texts in which there has been a surge of popular interest in recent years, thanks to the international selling, buying, and swapping communities and opportunities fostered by the internet. I was prompted to post something here after discovering within such a recent purchase a fascinating supplementary fragment of material text, pictured here. For those unfamiliar with the process of making one’s own clothes at home, it is worth explaining that dressmaking patterns usually consist of tissue paper templates and a printed sheet of measurements and instructions, inside an illustrated envelope. Templates can be reused again and again, and it is perfectly possible to find patterns from over fifty years ago that are still in very good condition. Written details are often charmingly of their era; a 1950s pattern by Butterick  for a ‘Cape Yoked Blouse of Many Moods’ for example is described on the envelope as ‘A blouse with a wonderfully split personality designed for wear morn to eve. (A) Afternoon in town blouse with below-elbow, puff sleeves. (B) Dinner appetizer with deep cut yoke, short sleeves. (C) Sleeveless morning casual.’

What I discovered inside my late 1950s dress pattern was a fragment of a local newspaper from a town in Texas, presumably originating from the same time. A previous user of this pattern had slightly altered the shape of one of the pieces and traced out her new design on a sheet of newspaper. As you can see, the page from which this pattern piece was made is the ‘Classifieds’ section. The adverts printed here give us a sense of the society in which the former user of this pattern lived, and at one level it is nothing special – this is the ordinary kind of literature about truck drivers and painters that we could all read in our local papers today (although if anyone could enlighten me as to what a ‘fountain girl’ did in a dairy I would be fascinated to know!). On closer inspection, though, it’s discomforting to the twenty-first century sensibility to notice jobs advertised specifically for ‘Colored Women’, or adverts which demand a ‘white man’ or ‘married men’. This fragment of newspaper is an everyday, disposable thing which at the same time preserves important details about a particular society at a particular moment in time – in this case, about  race and gender. Part of the startling effect of this discovery, I think, is the way it embodies the intrusion of major historical and political narratives into the everyday domestic. Newsheets are ubiquitously recycled materials, paper that is reused when the printed matter on it is no longer thought to be relevant. Through her efficient re-using of a newspaper sheet, the user of this pattern preserves a fragment of history and communicates something textual to us now in a way that she never would have imagined.

It was revealed earlier this month that the Ministry of Defence recently paid a large sum to have a publishing company destroy its entire first print run of Daily Telegraph journalist Toby Harnden’s book, ‘Dead Men Risen’, about the author’s experiences alongside British armed forces in Afghanistan. The Guardian reported in sinister tones that ‘all 24,000 copies are now being pulped under the supervision of military officials’. A controversially revised version of Harnden’s work is now available in bookshops, and you can read the author’s latest comments in response to this cynical and depressing story of censorship and book destruction here.

An interesting debate in the often controversial world of school examinations: according to this article from the Independent last week, the chief executive of Ofqual – the body responsible for monitoring GCSE and A Level examinations – believes that students should have more opportunities to write exam scripts on computers and that ‘school exams are running the risk of becoming invalid as their medium of pen and ink increasingly differs from the way in which youngsters learn.’

The natural familiarity of the youngest generations with computer technology in its increasingly sophisticated forms is a commonplace of contemporary society, but should we be concerned by this embracing of IT as the main medium of writing seemingly at the expense of (rather than alongside) pen and ink, by those near the top of the education hierarchy?

Many thanks to Sebastiaan for alerting me to the work of Brian Dettmer, an American artist who uses knives, tweezers, and other surgical instruments to transform old encyclopaedias and dictionaries into visually and technically impressive pieces of sculpture. More images of his work can be seen here or here.

Nothing is added to these books; rather, with the aid of his sharp tools Dettmer investigates their contents in corporeal terms, exposing, in the example above, the grotesque innards of volumes we usually think of as neat, orderly, and contained. The physicality of the book is full of interpretative potential for Dettmer, and his sculptures interrogate the three-dimensional space of the book as material object to be physically as well as intellectually probed and dissected.

That’s the edge of a razor blade, considerably magnified, on which a professional copper and steel engraver has etched these words by hand. Read the full story of one man’s obsession with engraving on miniscule objects and surfaces here.

Anyone who believes in the fundamental importance of public libraries and their contents will be interested to read the damning speech made by novelist Philip Pullman in response to news that his local libraries in Oxfordshire are threatened by public funding cuts. The polemical speech, which takes us from our own local libraries to the Bodleian, Alexandria, Chicago, and back again, is available in its eloquent entirety here.

The Guardian reports that a US publisher, Black Ocean, is offering lifetime subscriptions to their publications for anyone who gets a real tattoo related to one of Black Ocean’s book titles. Read more about this bizarre material interface between readers and their books here, and see some of those hopefuls who’ve already sent in photos of their tattoos to Black Ocean here.

How would you depict your favourite book in tattoo form?

Does anyone recognise this script?

And the text on this piece of paper so ‘Worme-eaten, and full of canker holes’, as Spenser might describe it?

See here

until 2 January for an entertaining programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Boxing Day with Ben Schott, Irving Finkel, Moira Goff, and Adam Smyth about the history of almanacs, one of the most popular kinds of material text in the 16th and 17th centuries and at their height,  the bestselling books on the market after bibles.