WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 - SPORT 'This book is a work of art about football's works of art... Loved it.' - Kevin Day, broadcaster 'A beautiful showcase of such a distinctive part of the game's culture... impossible not to get lost in the book' - Miguel Delaney, The Independent 'Gorgeous to behold... Unmissable' - Danny Kelly, TalkSPORT radio presenter 'I absolutely love this book' - Jules Breach, football presenter On high-rise buildings, street corners and stadium walls in countries around the world, eye-catching murals pay tribute to footballing greats. From Messi and Ronaldo to Rapinoe and Cruyff, these striking displays are remarkable testaments to the awe and affection fans feel for these football legends and cult heroes. Join renowned football writer and broadcaster Andy Brassell as he explores this fascinating phenomenon. Offering a fresh, highly visual perspective on the global game, Football Murals is the first book to celebrate these towering works of art. Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Rooney and Ronaldinho, Totti and Salah, Zlatan and Zidane - being honoured with a mural cements a player's place in a club's heritage and links them to the heart of the community. This richly illustrated book showcases the most impressive examples, explores their inspirational qualities and examines what they say about these icons and their sport. Written and curated by respected football writer Andy Brassell, this ground-breaking book features more than 100 murals from around the world, capturing the scale, grandeur and wit of this powerful and popular art form. Through a series of short essays and extended captions, Andy shares the players' stories, discusses the cultural politics and explains just why these men and women have been immortalised in mural form. Covering such diverse topics as Home Town Glory, Football Fame and The Cult of the Coach, Football Murals addresses the issues important to fans worldwide. It spans Marcus Rashford's inspirational mural in a Manchester suburb, the George Best tribute on the East Belfast estate where he was born, the 15-foot depiction of Megan Rapinoe in St Paul, Minnesota, and the Naples 'shrine' to Diego Maradona.

This visually rich survey - the first of its kind - showcases the work of over 200 artists and celebrates the explosion of street art in Africa over the last decade. Including twelve in-depth interviews with street artists active in Africa today as well as coverage of the continent's major street art projects, collectives and festivals, it takes the reader on an introductory tour of the many African street art scenes, with a deeper focus on the most prominent players in Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. Topics and projects covered include the monumental project Murais da Leba in Angola, which saw 6,000 square metres of wall covered by local graffiti and visual artists in the Serra da Leba mountain range; the cultural influences and idiosyncrasies of individual street art scenes, and how they mesh with local communities; and eL Seed's project 'Perception', a huge multi-part mural stretching across more than fifty buildings in Cairo's Zaraeeb neighbourhood, revealing a message of hope to its marginalized community in the artist's distinctive 'calligraffiti' style. Text commentaries elaborating on styles and processes, and social and cultural context, are peppered throughout the book, giving the reader further insight into a wealth of striking contemporary visual cultures - and helping make this a must-have for street art fans and practitioners.

The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices designed to augment and enhance people's natural appearance. Tattooing, the process of inserting pigment into the skin to create permanent designs and patterns, is one of the most widespread forms of body art and was practiced by ancient cultures throughout the world, with tattoos appearing on human mummies by 3200 BCE. Ancient Ink, the first book dedicated to the archaeological study of tattooing, presents new, globe-spanning research examining tattooed human remains, tattoo tools, and ancient art. Connecting ancient body art traditions to modern culture through Indigenous communities and the work of contemporary tattoo artists, the volume's contributors reveal the antiquity, durability, and significance of body decoration, illuminating how different societies have used their skin to construct their identities.

Ride back in time on the colorful New York City subway line of the 1970s to 1990s; the graffiti years, when subway cars became rolling metal canvases for some of the most notorious and influential graffiti writers of all time. Explore the amazing array of art work from the 1970s, '80s and '90s transit system graveyards, including the work of graffiti artists BLADE, GHOST, SENT, REAS, VEN, WOLF, and STRIDER, as well as many other talented underdogs. The era is richly illustrated with over 235 rare, never-before-published photographs accompanied by personal accounts from the writers talking about their art and recalling their wild antics. This is an informative, nostalgic look at New York subway graffiti.

Mid-Century Gothic defines a distinct post-war literary and cultural moment in Britain, lasting ten years from 1945-55. This was a decade haunted by the trauma of fascism and war, but equally uneasy about the new norms of peacetime and the resurgence of commodity culture. As old assumptions about the primacy of the human subject became increasingly uneasy, culture answered with gothic narratives that reflected two troubling qualities of the new objects of modernity: their uncannily autonomous agency, and their disquieting intimacy with the reified human body. The book offers fresh readings of novels, plays, essays and films of the period, unearthing neglected texts as well as reassessing canonical works. By bringing these into dialogue with the mid-century architecture, exhibitions and material culture, it provides a new perspective on a notoriously neglected historical moment and challenges previous accounts of the supposed timidity of post-war culture. -- .

A gorgeous collection of 145 original portraits that celebrates Black pioneers-famous and little-known--in politics, science, literature, music, and more-with biographical reflections, all created and curated by an award-winning graphic designer. Illustrated Black History is a breathtaking collection of original portraits depicting black heroes-both famous and unsung-who made their mark on activism, science, politics, business, medicine, technology, food, arts, entertainment, and more. Each entry includes a lush drawing or painting by artist George McCalman, along with an insightful essay summarizing the person's life story. The 145 entries range from the famous to the little-known, from literary luminary James Baldwin to documentarian Madeline Anderson, who produced "I Am Somebody" about the 1969 strike of mostly female hospital workers; from Aretha Franklin to James and Eloyce Gist, who had a traveling ministry in the early 1900s; from Colin Kaepernick to Guion S. Bluford, the first Black person to travel into space. Beautifully designed with over 300 unique four-color artworks and accessible to readers of all ages, this eye-opening, educational, dynamic, and timely compendium pays homage to Black Americans and their achievements, and showcases the depth and breadth of Black genius.

"This is a piercing journey down to the core of the dark labyrinth of modern life... A dictionary of an absurd and reality in graffiti."

In this volume, Milnor considers how the fragments of textual graffiti which survive on the walls of the Roman city of Pompeii reflect and refract the literary world from which they emerged. Focusing in particular on the writings which either refer to or quote canonical authors directly, Milnor uncovers the influence- in diction, style, or structure-of elite Latin literature as the Pompeian graffiti show significant connections with familiar authors such as Ovid, Propertius, and Virgil. While previous scholarship has described these fragments as popular distortions of well-known texts, Milnor argues that they are important cultural products in their own right, since they are able to give us insight into how ordinary Romans responded to and sometimes rewrote works of canonical literature. Additionally, since graffiti are at once textual and material artefacts, they give us the opportunity to see how such writings gave meaning to, and were given meaning by, the ancient urban environment. Ultimately, the volume looks in detail at the role and nature of 'popular' literature in the early Roman Empire and the place of poetry in the Pompeian cityscape.

Scrapbooks have been around since printed matter began to flow into the lives of ordinary people, a flow that became an ocean in nineteenth-century America. Though libraries can show us the vast archive-literally thousands of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and annuals were flooding the public once mass-circulation was common-we have little knowledge of what, and particularly how people read. Writing with Scissors follows swimmers through that first ocean of print. We know that thousands of people were making meaning out of the swirl of paper that engulfed them. Ordinary readers processed the materials around them, selected choice examples, and created book-like collections that proclaimed the importance of what they read. Writing with Scissors explores the scrapbook making practices of men and women who had varying positions of power and access to media. It considers what the bookmakers valued and what was valued by the people or institutions that sheltered them over time. It compares nineteenth-century scrapbooking methods with current techniques for coping with an abundance of new information on the Web, such as bookmarks, favorites lists, and links. The book is part of a developing literature in cultural studies and book history exploring reading practices of ordinary readers. Scholars interested in the burgeoning field of print culture have not yet taken full advantage of scrapbooks, these great repositories of American memory. Rather than just using evidence from scrapbooks, Garvey turns to the scrapbook as a genre on its own. Her book offers a fascinating view of the semi-permeable border between public and domestic realms, illuminating the ongoing negotiation between readers and the press.

More than ever education students are required to study the social context of youth culture in order to understand and design meaningful, motivational curiculum. There is a need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to address the critical issues which confront the education of youth today. In studying hip-hop graffiti, the author explores a crucial but neglected area in the contemporary training of youth workers and educators.

The author interviewed ten hip-hop graffiti writers of various race, class, and gender by audiotape and reviewed them until patterns emerged as themes, mainly issues concerning public space and community. She continued her relationship with the participants over a five-year period to observe the diversity and transformation of individuals within graffiti culture.

The study begins with a literature review from Web resources, books, and subculture magazines on graffiti in order to define The Structure of Traditional Hip-Hop Graffiti Culture. This chapter lays the basic foundation familiar to all writers and points to the main issues in order to analyze how individual writers conform to or deviate from the standard subculture. The author addresses the complex issues which are layered behind a residue of illegally painted signatures, characters, and text. There is a need for the voices of young people to be heard, especially those who have found artistic integrity, and awareness of civic and political issues on their own terms. Youth are in an ongoing struggle to construct personal identities and communities that they want to live in. Hip-hop graffiti is only one example where they have created a space, within a peer-run environment, to respect and encourage their political powers, ideas, and skills. The book asks whether an understanding of how adolescents learn outside of school can generate alternative sites for curriculum theorizing.