First of all, the format is fresh! It's made just like a blackbook: same cover and everything. Stephen Powers (Espo) was the publisher of the great On the Go magazine, which brings a good sense of organization to a really spread out collection. Even though Espo has become somewhat of a famous artist with his huge shutter pieces, this is not a book about him. In fact, there isn't that much Espo stuff in here at all. Instead, it's like a blackbook he had all his boys fill up with their shoeboxes and memories. It's divided into sections, some dedicated to writers (like Revs, Blade, Sane/Smith) some dedicated to the history of graffiti styles and culture (like The Bench, Beef, Crews, Throwups). The pages are filled with artwork, history and styles from the last 30 years, from some early Philly writers like Cornbread straight to some of todays best. It's great to have all this information and documentation somewhere in a book because it's like holding the history and artifacts of a culture and marking it's territory. The book highlights a big portion of the New York and Philly's graf history gives us lots of stories, a lot of pics and a lot of different aspects that bring together Espo's vision of "Graffiti at the Millenium". Revs, Grey, Ces, Cycle, Blade, Reas, Sane/Smith, KR, Amaze, Suroc get their own sections and a lot of people get their full stories told along with histories of style, traditions, evolutions of materials and methods. It might not be the whole story, but there's loads of shit to eat up in here and well worth having.

reviewed by the mgmnt