It housed a military-style steel desk, a shortwave radio, a new IBM computer, and a wastebasket full of tractor-feed paper stained with red betel nut spit under a sign that emphatically declared NO SPITTING.

The exhibition of these works, their paper stained with the salt and sweat of the poets' fingertips, makes for a peculiar intimacy, a sense of being present at the sonnet's tortured creation.

Her cheeks were wet with tears, the paper stained with her sorrow, when she finally put the note aside.

It sat on a folded piece of paper, stained with blood cells that died instead of transforming.

In later years he developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water colour.

But Vimes felt around between gum and cheek and fished out a folded piece of paper, stained with unknowable juices.

The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.

On a sunny afternoon in late spring, Bloomfield was holed up in a plaid-curtained booth at the back of the Breslin's dining room, rustling through a sheaf of papers stained with olive oil.