Iconic David Bowie "READ" poster returns to shelves, reviving a decades-old tribute to a voracious reader

The American Library Association's beloved image of David Bowie — mid-leap in a letterman jacket, book in hand — is back in front of fans again, as ALA Graphics continues to make its 1987 READ poster available through the ALA Store, prompting a fresh round of social media buzz from librarians and Bowie devotees alike. Get your poster here.

The 22" x 34" poster, priced at $18 (with a member discount bringing it to $16.20) and sold under item number 5010-2632, shows a boyishly grinning Bowie caught in motion, absorbed in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. This latest print run is framed by ALA Graphics as part of the celebration of ALA's 150th anniversary, bringing back one of the organization's most requested images. It was originally shot for ALA's long-running READ campaign, a series that has invited celebrities across music, film, sports, and literature to pose with a favorite book since 1985. 

Bowie was among the campaign's earliest and most enduring faces, and organizers have noted he was one of the first celebrities to agree to participate. Check out his campaign poster below:

A reissue with history

This isn't the first time the poster has returned from the archives. ALA Graphics previously reissued the image in early 2016, in the weeks following Bowie's death on January 10 of that year. Framed as "by popular demand," that limited-run reprint honored Bowie as a singer-songwriter, actor, producer, and artist, and noted his 1996 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award he received in 2006. 

That reprint sold out and briefly disappeared from ALA's own store, fueling years of fan requests, including a 2021 Change.org petition urging the organization to bring it back a second time for collectors who'd missed out or worn out their original copies.

The poster's staying power says as much about library marketing as it does about Bowie himself: of all the musicians, actors, and athletes to appear in the READ series over four decades, few images have proven as durable or as widely reproduced in classrooms, dorm rooms, and library hallways as Bowie's.

The book behind the photo

Bowie's choice of The Idiot — Dostoevsky's story of a man whose goodness is mistaken for naivety — was no accident. Friends, collaborators, and biographers have long described Bowie as a serious and wide-ranging reader, not merely a celebrity playing along with a library promotion.

In 2013, to accompany the David Bowie Is retrospective exhibit at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Bowie released a list of his 100 favorite books, spanning Homer's The Iliad to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, along with George Orwell's 1984, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Hardly a collection of casual beach reads, the list revealed an appetite for dense, often difficult work across fiction, poetry, art criticism, and cultural history.

Photo Credfit: Fort Wayne Silent Book Club

Bowie was known to travel with an extensive personal library and reportedly kept nearly every book he ever bought, once describing himself as self-educated and unable to part with anything he'd read. Directors and collaborators who worked with him, including Nicolas Roeg on The Man Who Fell to Earth, took note of just how much reading material he brought along to set. 

That appetite shaped his music as directly as it shaped his image. 1984 — a novel Bowie counted among his favorites — pushed him toward an abandoned stage-musical adaptation in the early 1970s; when the Orwell estate declined to grant the rights, the leftover material became several tracks on 1974's Diamond Dogs, including "1984," "Big Brother," and "We Are the Dead."

Part of a living campaign

The Bowie poster isn't returning to an empty shelf. ALA Graphics currently sells it alongside a lineup of newer READ posters, showing the four-decade-old campaign is still adding faces rather than just trading on nostalgia. Recent additions include a poster of Lizzo holding the picture book Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar, and one of singer Laufey with a copy of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. The current catalog also includes a poster featuring Mychal Threets, the librarian and mental-health advocate known for his social media presence, shown with The Monster at the End of This Book.

Rounding out the current slate are several non-celebrity designs: a "Fireworks" poster depicting a grandmother reading to her grandchildren, an "All the Right Notes" poster imagining a gramophone as a library streaming out books and media, a Snoopy poster built around the Peanuts character's love of happy endings, a "Why We Love Graphic Novels" poster illustrating reasons to pick up the format, and an "Emily the Strange" poster showing the goth-cartoon icon reading alongside her black cats. Together, the lineup illustrates how the READ campaign has broadened over the years beyond single celebrity portraits to include pop-culture characters, thematic art, and advocates from inside the library world itself — even as Bowie's photo remains one of its most recognizable anchors.

Unlike the sold-out 2016 run, the poster currently remains listed and orderable through ALA Graphics' online store, giving new fans — and longtime collectors replacing worn or missing copies — a straightforward way to bring the image home.