I recently bought a smart but very old suede handbag, second-hand. The clever design of the bag embraces its function as an object of both practicality and of aesthetic value. I was also attracted to it because of the information on the label – made in the small town of Pitlochry in the heart of Scotland, this accessory is a beautiful example of British craftsmanship, regrettably an increasingly rare phenomenon in our age of cheap imported goods made by exploited factory workers in China and Eastern Europe.

Inside the zipped pocket of this bag, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a tiny material text. It is a return ticket, printed on stiff card and measuring approximately 1×2 inches, for a mountain cable car in Austria. The ticket bears no date, but the price (24 schillings) is a clue to how old it might be – several decades, at the very least. The two holes suggest that the holder of this ticket successfully validated their ticket and made it up and down the mountain. Ephemeral texts like this one are all around us, and ironically it is often such small and disposable material texts as travel tickets, till receipts, and shopping lists, that slip through gaps or are stuffed without a second thought into pockets, and survive by being forgotten, to be discovered unexpectedly at times and places in the indeterminate future.

This particular ticket connects us to a specific tourist attraction (the Pfänderbahn above Lake Constance still exists, by the way, current price ten euros and eighty cents for an Adult return ticket), but what is most interesting about it as a material text is the unwritten story behind its survival and discovery in the personal space of a handbag. The unearthing of such ephemeral texts traces faint but tantalising connections between people and places, inviting us to imagine the journeys a text, no matter how small, has taken to reach us.

I am writing here as a graduate student guest blogger. Over the next few weeks I will be contributing more thoughts and reflections on material texts, not all of them as small or ephemeral as this one!