On LitHub, James Folta has assembled a list of the 100 Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read. The posters (all but one) are from the American Library Association. I’m Canadian so I’ve never seen any of these posters. They are gold. And Folta’s commentary is even better.

On one with John Cena in a suit, holding a children’s storybook:

This poster’s not bad, but mostly it’s not anything. Cena looks like a CEO in the third act of a feel-good movie who just learned the power of love thanks to a gang of scrappy kids. This whole poster looks like it’s afraid of hot sauce.

On one with Nathan Fillion:

To me, Fillion always gives off the vibes of a weird neighbor kid who is two grades above you and you can’t quite figure out his deal, and this picture of him looking up from a book called Awakening on Orbis 4 isn’t helping dissuade me of that preconception.

William Hurt:

William Hurt is one of our finest actors whose name is also a sentence fragment. Here, Hurt has the expression of a beleaguered father who is struggling to make peace with the fact that he accidentally ordered gigantic blocks instead of normal-sized ones and his whole family has been roasting him for hours.

The posters themselves are amazing — the R.E.M. one is absolute early-90’s perfection — and the commentary is a fun style that we don’t see much of on the web anymore.

Check it out here.

---