Photographer and master printer Brian Young first arrived in New York City in 1984. He witnessed all the well-known ills of '70s and early '80s New York, finding the city slowly, haltingly recovering from an economic depression. Industry and manufacturing jobs had left the city, and the population continued to drain out to the suburbs. The "crack epidemic" was on the front pages and on the streets. Abandoned shells of burnt-out cars littered the roads and muggings were simply a fact of daily life. Young found his camera increasingly drawn to the subway system--one of the great social levelers of life in New York City and, increasingly, the canvas for an explosive profusion of graffiti. Brian Young: The Train NYC 1984 collects the photographer's quiet, black-and-white shots of the subway from 1984, bringing a vanished New York evocatively back to life.

Fascinating pavement chalk art by a master of the craft, now with new art. "Beever's mastery and unbridled humour are on full display in these dazzling drawings, each accompanied by a description that details artistic techniques, discusses challenges the artist faced, and offers an inside look into his process." Publishers Weekly (starred review, on the previous edition). The pavement chalk artist is a master of art, perspective, creativity and performance. Julian Beever is one such extraordinary master. More than just traditional flat drawings, the works Beever creates are uniquely three-dimensional anamorphic drawings. They are drawn in perspective and distorted so the subject can be viewed properly only from one particular viewpoint. For those who are standing in the right place, his chalk drawings invite them to step right into the scene or, in the case of the artist's well-known "Swimming Pool in the High Street", dive right into the water. Pavement Chalk Artist includes a fabulous selection of Beever's most intriguing anamorphic drawings. Each one is accompanied by a description of the techniques he used and the challenges he overcame. These photographs record the development of his unusual skill and understanding of perspective. Readers can see how his art progresses and matures as he takes on commissioned works and a wealth of original, inventive subjects in locations worldwide. The photographs tell the story, giving readers both an understanding of the principles of this 3-D art form and the pleasure of sharing the scenes that passersby once enjoyed before these unique works disappeared forever. This new edition includes 16 new pages of Beever's recent art, in addition to the 16 added to the second edition, for a total of 32 new pages.

Hailed as the seminal study of spray can art of the 1970s and 1980s, "Aerosol Kingdom" explores the origins and aesthetics of graffiti writings.

From a vast array of inherited traditions and gritty urban lifestyles talented and renegade young New Yorkers spawned a culture of their own, a balloon-lettered shout heralding the coming of hip-hop. Though helpless in checking its spreading appeal, city fathers immediately went on the attack and denounced it as vandalism. Many aficionados, however, recognized its trendy aesthetic immediately. By the 1980s spray-paint art hit the mainstream, and subway painters, mostly from marginal barrios of the city, became art world darlings. Their proliferating, ephemeral art was spotlighted in downtown galleries, in the media, and thereafter throughout the land. Not only did the practice of "public signaturing" take over New York City, but also, as the images moved through the neighborhoods on the subway cars, it also grabbed hold in the suburbs. Soon it stirred worldwide imitation and helped spark the hip-hop revolution.

As the artists wielded their spray cans, they expressed their acute social consciousness. "Aerosol Kingdom" documents their careers and records the reflections of key figures in the movement. It examines converging forces that made aerosol art possible--the immigration of Caribbean peoples, the reinforcing presence of black American working-class styles and fashions, the effects of advertising on children, the mass marketing of spray cans, and the popular protests of the 1960s and 1970s against racism, sexism, classism, and war.

The creative period of the movement lasted for over twenty years, but most of the original works have vanished. Official cleanup of public sites erased great pieces of the heyday. They exist now only in photographs, in the artists' sketchbooks, and now in "Aerosol Kingdom."

Most of the everyday writing from the ancient world - that is, informal writing not intended for a long life or wide public distribution - has perished. Reinterpreting the silences and blanks of the historical record, leading papyrologist Roger S. Bagnall convincingly argues that ordinary people - from Britain to Egypt to Afghanistan - used writing in their daily lives far more extensively than has been recognized. Marshalling new and little-known evidence, including remarkable graffiti recently discovered in Smyrna, Bagnall presents a fascinating analysis of writing in different segments of society. His book offers a new picture of literacy in the ancient world in which Aramaic rivals Greek and Latin as a great international language, and in which many other local languages develop means of written expression alongside these metropolitan tongues.

The title, ALL CITY WRITERS, describes a vast research on the Writing movement, focusing particularly on the process of its exportation from New York to all of Europe during the '80s. The first part of the research analyzes how graffiti in media such as movies, videos, magazines, and books from New York influenced Europe. When images of the New York subway arrived in London, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam, a huge milestone was set: A first generation of European graffiti writers started to follow the letters, the method, the techniques, and the general lifestyle of New York in the '70s.

The book, a massive volume of more than 400 pages, has been conceived as an imaginary newspaper. The chronicles it contains have not been penned by real journalists or narrators but by people who define themselves as 'writers.' In this volume, a chorus of uncensored voices in the first person reveal their knowledge of European cities, their infrastructures, interstices, and neighborhoods. This is the generation who, in the last two decades of the 20th Century, imported the countercultural phenomenon from New York commonly known as 'Graffiti.'

At the outset, the obsessive repetition of a tag and the search for urban fame became a widespread and spontaneous act, an infinite ego trip that was rarely dissociated from the reproduction of the chosen letters. In these pages, European writers abandon the compulsive act of tagging for a moment, to narrate the city and cast a personal eye--not always detached--on the trains, the streets, and the urban surroundings that common citizens generally cannot or will not acknowledge. The chapters that compose this book focus on special themes, comparable to the sections of a daily newspaper, presented here as special reports on the New York subway, the European network, or the first urban strongholds.

The combination of these elements, including, among others, a detailed, in-depth description of the phenomenon's explosion in Italy during the '90s, provides a unique history of the variety of pathways they explored and documents the desires of an entire generation intent on describing and interpreting their cultural movement. Through historic and detailed documentation deriving from a singular urban episode, the New York City Subway, ALL CITY WRITERS wants to investigate the evolution and the consequences of a countercultural phenomenon, which in the last decades has provoked a change in the rules of aesthetics and communication in modern day society.