This is far from the first recorded instance of someone scrawling a bit of mid-poo poetry-for example, the Roman poet Martial, who lived in the first century AD, totally zinged a rival writer with the suggestion that if he wanted to get published, he should go find a bathroom wall. An Englishman going by the pseudonym “Hurlo Thrumbo” collected this and other such vintage graffiti in his book The Merry Thought: Or, The Glass Window and the Bog-House, published in 1731. So was written on a boghouse sometime in the early 18th century-a boghouse being a public toilet.
“Well sung of Yore, a Bard of Wit/That some Folks read, but all Folks shit/But now the Case is alter’d quite/Since all who come to Boghouse write.”
