Literature & Poetry Posters

Literary Posters for Readers and Book Lovers

What is a literature poster?

A literature poster turns a book, a writer or a single line of verse into a piece of wall art. Ours take four forms: portraits of authors, illustrated poems, short quotations set in type, and images inspired by famous novels. They are printed on thick archival paper, so the text stays sharp even in small sizes.

Portraits made of words

Some posters draw a writer's face with their own text. Up close you read lines from Kafka's The Burrow, Rimbaud's Illuminations, Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal or Hugo's Les Contemplations; from across the room, the portrait appears. The five designs are gathered in Written Faces, our typographic portraits of writers. Beside them hang Étienne Carjat's famous photograph of Baudelaire and a cosmic-horror portrait of Lovecraft.

Poems you live with

A line of poetry on the wall works differently from a line in a book: you pass it every day, and it slowly becomes part of the room. That is the idea behind our illustrated poems, where the text stays at the heart of the image and the drawing gives it color: Rimbaud's "It has been found again. What? Eternity" over a sun sinking into the sea, Apollinaire's "Your tongue, this goldfish", Aragon's "I carry you within me like a wounded bird". The largest series follows Baudelaire's dreams of distant shores, with eleven posters gathered in our Baudelaire posters.

Quotes and single words

Short texts set in type suit an office or a hallway: Rimbaud's "I is another", Aragon's "By the time we learn to live, it's already too late", the old Greek maxim "Know thyself", or Lovecraft's warning "Do not call up any that you cannot put down". Sometimes one word is enough: Poème under the stars, L'Infini over the sea, Rêveur with its sunburst face. More of these French words are in Sacred Words.

Novels, tales and painters who read

Some posters celebrate the books themselves: Frank Herbert's Dune (read the story behind the novel), The Count of Monte Cristo, Philip K. Dick at his typewriter, and a 1936 Little Red Riding Hood. Painters were readers too: Van Gogh painted his Piles of French Novels and slipped Zola's La Joie de vivre beside his Oleanders, and Matisse put Pascal's Pensées in a still life. More imagined worlds await in our science fiction posters.

A gift for someone who has read everything

Buying for a big reader is hard: they probably own the book already, sometimes twice. A poster of a favorite author or verse takes no shelf space and shows you know what they love. It looks right above a bookcase, in a reading corner or a home library, or over a desk.