Toronto’s Humber River bridge gets lit-tagged
Non-sequitur graffiti has been the rage in Toronto for a while – the Val Kilmer faces that showed up a couple of years ago being the most notable example – but someone recently gave the fad a literary spin, as reported by Torontoist.com:
It seems that some Toronto taggers are no longer content to scrawl their own names on blank concrete canvases around the city and are trying instead to make more of a cultural statement. Last year, references to composer Gustav Mahler popped up in several places around town. This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming “ISBN 486-28495-6″ for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
Making it a reference to the Dover paperback edition is a nice, democratic touch. Even when book nerds go bad, they’re still nerds.
(And being nerds ourselves, we have to note that the ISBN is actually 0-486-28495-6.)
Actually, that may be a clue to help the police determine the identity of the vandal - he/she must be familiar with a Wordstock or similar system, which drops the zero at the beginning of the ISBN for brevity.
Pool of suspects = shrinking.