The Editor: Martyn Lyons was born in London and is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the author of several works on French revolutionary history and on the history of the book and of reading practices. He was co-author of Australian Readers Remember (1994), author of Le Triomphe du Livre (1987) and of Readers and Society in 19th-century France (2001), and contributed to A History of Reading in the West (eds Cavallo and Chartier).

• Contents: Martyn Lyons: ‘Ordinary Writings’ or How the ‘Illiterate’ Speak to Historians – Nicolas Adell-Gombert: Total Writing: The Writing Practices of Compagnons on the Tour de France – Kaisa Kauranen: Did Writing Lead to Social Mobility? Case Studies of Ordinary Writers in Nineteenth-Century Finland – Maarten Van Ginderachter: ‘If your Majesty would only send me a little money to help buy an elephant’: Letters to the Belgian Royal Family (1880-1940) – Christophe Pons: The Mystical and the Modern: The Uses of Ordinary Writings in Identity Construction by Icelandic Spiritual Mediums – Nigel Hall/Julia Gillen: Purchasing Pre-packed Words: Complaint and Reproach in Early British Postcards – Sally Cove: Ordinary Writings, Secretive Writing Practices: Social Transgression and the YIVO Autobiographies – Antonio Castillo Gómez/Verónica Sierra Blas: ‘If my pen was as good as your pistol’: The Acquisition and Uses of Writing on the Republican Fronts during the Spanish Civil War – Anne Wingenter: Voices of Sacrifice: Letters to Mussolini and Ordinary Writing under Fascism – Krystallia Makatou: Ordinary Writing in Greece: Young People’s Diaries – Marie-Claude Penloup: Literary Temptations and Leisure-time Copying: Spontaneous Adolescent Writing in Contemporary France.