Guerilla reading goes above-ground

Reading, one of the world’s most enduring pastimes, hasn’t historically needed clever ads or flashy marketing campaigns to convince people of its worth. But Coffee Sleeves Conversation, as the Coffee House Press project became known, is one of a number of growing efforts around the world to advertise literature as a whole—by taking the message that reading can be accessible, enjoyable, and life-improving to unexpected places, from vending machines and subway cars to fast-food chains. 

“It’s a way of putting literature in a public space and giving people a literary experience that isn’t reading a book,” says Caroline Casey, Coffee House Press’s managing director. “You don’t know how people will experience what’s on the sleeve but you know that they will experience it.” The company decided to print excerpts of poetry and prose written by local writers of color on 10,000 coffee sleeves, which it will distribute around the St. Paul area. For Casey, the project is a way to create complexity and visibility, as well as to help break down preconceived notions about literature’s elitism.

The same kind of thinking can be found in programs like London’s Poems on the Underground. The project, which turns 30 this year, features poetry on the walls of Tube cars, and has been copied in many cities across the U.S. including New York, with the now-defunct initiatives Poetry in Motion and Train of Thought. In London, the only requirement for the selected poems is that they fit within the limits of an advertising space. Poems on the Underground’s founder, Judith Chernaik, has described the program as “an implicit contradiction of the assumption that poetry is an elitist art,” stating that “the tube poems are popular because they offer an escape from the combined pressures of advertising and daily work. They invite the traveller to share the dreams and visions of another human being, speaking across time and place.” 

Newer projects, Coffee Sleeve Conversation among them, focus less on traditional ad spaces and instead mimic the tactics used by guerrilla marketing, an idea pioneered by Jay Conrad Levinson in 1984. The strategy relies upon imagination rather than a big budget to advertise a product, and emphasizes the unconventional and unexpected to make a bigger impact. Earlier this year, the publisher Short Edition installed eight short-story vending machines in the city of Grenoble, France—to read a short story, free of charge, pedestrians press buttons indicating story length, and then the machine prints out one of 600 available stories. In Argentina, the artist Raul Lemesoff constructed a “weapon of mass instruction,” a 1979 Ford Falcon modified into a military-style “book tank” with exterior shelves that could hold 900 books. In celebration of World Book Day in March 2015, Lemesoff delivered books to citizens for free (as long as they promised to read them).