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There are also a wide variety of exceptional cases arising from practices of Concrete poetry and poetics, to which we will return. However, typically text is a matter for surfaces. In so far as it dwells in space, it dwells on surfaces. Usually this is an opaque and resistant surface, through which other physical objects, including ourselves, cannot pass; not, at least, without damaging or destroying the writing. Of course, surfaces that bear writing do themselves have locations in real space. They are, typically, portable and often gathered into piles or collections of paper leaves. In the West, traditionally, the codex book is where writing most often dwells.

In the World of Letters, writing in real space occurs on signs, on monumental inscriptions, and on objects that require labels, chiefly containers or vehicles. These are all special surfaces which are very much site and context specific, set up to function in an exact and particular manner — to inform, warn, attract custom and attention; to celebrate, memorialize, identify, and so on. Note that only rarely is the text displayed on surfaces in space anything other than functional; such text requires to be inscribed and read out of necessity rather than rhetorical desire.