Thanks to Beth for the link: a librarian gives the righteous fug treatment to READ posters featuring shoddily dressed celebs holding books in their hands and vacant expressions on their faces.
Word. I hope she keeps it up.
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Those really are bad posters. And why should movie stars be shilling for books, anyway? Is it a one-size-fits-all, I’m famous so pay attention to me thing? Oh, sorry. For a moment I lost touch with reality. Yes, it is that kind of thing.
Why not get actual writers of famous books, dress them fabulously and put them in some fascinating locale/situation that relates to their book(s)? Something that might actually make people want to read?
The thing that got me—okay, two things. One, they all look like they’ve been Photoshopped, especially Julia Stiles who looks like her body has shrunk in all directions. Was she always so disproportionately short?
The other one is that of four poster for the American Library Association, one celeb is Irish and two are English. Great turnout, guys.
They’d have to go a long way to top the classic Sting “READ” poster from 1985, where he’s dressed in period clothes from “The Bride”. Horrific movie, but the library poster was droolworthy!
Unfortunately I couldn’t bring my Googlefu into play to find it online, but trust me, it was luscious.
On the Harrison Ford poster, you can’t even see the cover of the book!
Kinda kills the whole point.
God, those are awful. I remember the ones from my childhood being pretty awful (I think there was a particularly bad Michael J. Fox? Poor Michael J. Fox doesn’t deserve that) but these are fug.
Wow. And I thought celebs looked vacant on the covers of tabloid photographs. Though… is it sad that I thought, “All they need now is a Johnny Depp poster to complete the Piratey trifecta!”
…Shouldn’t have posted that. Now I’m going to give them ideas.
WARNING! WEAPONS-GRADE NERDITY FOLLOWS THIS OBNOXIOUS STRING OF ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!
One of my favorite video games features a series of colorful parody “READ” posters, only instead of books, the fictional celebrities depicted therein are cradling braaaaains. If they made READ posters like that in real life, I would buy them by the gross and persuade every library in town to display them prominently.
I’m a librarian and I used to work in advertising, so these posters are offensively fug on two fronts! First, the celebrities are styled horribly—I know the ALA likely can’t afford high-powered stylists, but COME ON. Second, the celebrity-book pairings are so obvious and expected; who says Orlando Bloom has to hold a copy of Lord of the Rings? Why not have these people hold books they themselves read?
Not all the ALA posters are as vacant as the ones I’ve featured… no, yeah, they all suck.
So my question is if ALA got Johnny Depp to pose, what would Johnny Depp, ideally, be reading? (I know what he’d ideally be WEARING, heh heh)…
I would pose Johnny Depp reading either Treasure Island or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In my wildest fantasy, he’d be dressed as Jack Sparrow and reading Pirate’s Price.[g]
Lots on librarians lately. This guy is hunky.
Julia Weist’s Sexy Librarian, which has a great cover, and is a wonderful story, a romance, is featured at http://www.literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com
p.s. My spam catcher code was Men14!
I remember a great READ poster from years ago that featured the entire cast of Star Trek: Voyager holding books they actually chose themselves. If I was in charge of such things I wouldn’t bother with Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley, I’d go with the cast of Battlestar Galactica. I have a pic of Aaron Douglas in costume as Chief Tyrol reading James Bradley’s Flyboys—it’s a readymade READ poster!
And speaking of the classics, Patrick Stewart’s version, in which he’s cradling Shakespeare and looking incredibly hot, lives right next to my desk here at my library. Yum.
red67—hmm, shouldn’t that be READ67??
Y HALO THAR! *fans self*
Now that’s quality advertising.
In trying to find a picture of said Patrick Stewart READ poster on Google, I ran across this surprising picture of him as Oberon. Enjoy!
YOWZA! That’s quite a new image for Jean-Luc.
I’m always stunned, when I see pictures of actors that I consider to be presently old and /or ugly, and they used to be smokin’ hot.
Michael What-His-Face (Austin Powers’ dad) for instance. I saw Battle Over Britain a few weeks ago, and holy freaking cow. He used to be a god.
I don’t think Mr. Stewart’s bad-looking now, to be honest, but I was surprised to see him in so little clothing—even during the scenes of him boning the Emperor Tiberius’ wife in I, Claudius you don’t really see him down to the Roman equivalent of skivvies…
The Orlando Bloom one is up in the conference room at my Library System’s Admin building.
I don’t care how fugly it is, Orlando was still effing distracting the during the workshop I sat across the room from his poster.
Although, being the nerd I am, my fave ALA posters are the one’s done by book illustrators. (or steal from them anyway)
and Cat? they’ve got, like, trillions of the celebrity ones.
Talking of Patrick Stewart, I saw him as Prospero from The Tempest a few years back in Stratford-Upon-Avon. He was absolutely brilliant.
Some of the ALA posters were better than others. The State of Iowa ones though had some great posters. I particularly liked the Studying Harmonics and the Needlepoint one.