Graffiti artists aren’t particularly known for their bookishness. After all, when you spend your nights out on the street as a graphic art vigilante, you’re missing important time that could be spent snuggled up in bed with a book. So after we saw this spectacular Isaac Asimov portrait, we decided to go hunting for graffiti with a distinct literary bent — and in fact, the world abounds with bookish street art, from portraits of favorite authors to stenciled and scribbled quotes to representations of beloved characters. Click through to see twenty five of our favorite finds, from the reverent to the blatantly mocking, and let us know which author’s likeness you’d most like to stencil onto the walls of your city in the comments — or get out there and contribute to our collection.
Isaac Asimov, Rome [via]
Comments (8)
This is lovely, but there is a mural at the Brattle Bookstore in Boston that would have have been a great addition.
and here it is….
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79669341@N00/320092077
Brattle Book Shop, excuse me
I love these vibrant examples of words on the street, and would use this piece readily (if still teaching) as a living example of the cultural circuit (& radical potential of grassroots political/intellectual/arts production) in a cultural studies class… Students could go on to create & find their own images…
I wanted to pass along this wonderful literary street art from Oklahoma City. The day after I posted this on my blog, they painted over it. I’m glad I caught it before it went away.
http://www.jenx67.com/2011/12/this-oklahoma-life-everything-will-be.html
your image viewer was painfully slow!
A classic in Ann Arbor:
http://www.dwacphoto.com/keyword/bookstore%20mural%20ann%20arbor#!i=571281519&k=oLHPC
There is a great street in Dublin that has a bunch of Irish writers immortalized in graffiti; I took a sort of blurry photo of it when I was there in October–you can see Samuel Beckett there on the end:
http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k605/meaghanmcsorley/Dublin%20Street%20Art/DSC_0367.jpg
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