The book starts with a summary of the past and current legal situation in Switzerland about what can be shown on posters and what not, and who is responsible for law and order. It becomes clear that regulating taste and public morale is a difficult task, often quite arbitrary, and in frequent need of revision.

The next chapter analyzes the reasons for the controversy: Sex, esthetic problems, damage to persons or companies, politics and religion. It concludes with short text chapters on controversial advertising, on famous poster cases outside Switzerland, and controversial paintings, movies, books and music.

• I think it is a good sign for posters in general when some of them are talked about, evoke emotion, lead to heated debates. It means that the medium is alive and kicking, is still being taken seriously, is still a channel of communication. To look at controversy in posters from a historical point of view puts some of the current debates into perspective and sheds light onto the evolution of taste and tolerance. The book also shows that many of the controversial posters become quite acceptable, even good, even mainstream when viewed from a distance in time.

• The focus of the present study is on what a poster does, how it acts, how it is received. This point of view is completely neglected in most other poster publications, and also in most poster competitions where good looks is all that counts. It is quite possible for a poster to win a major competition even when it has been seen only by a handful of people before the award, and another two handfuls after, and is sometimes not understood even by the jury. This a strange situation. Can you imagine a chemical molecule being awarded a prize for it's beauty or the intellectual brilliance needed to design it, irrespective of the fact whether it workes as a medicine or not?

  Some poster publishing companies like the APG in Switzerland or the GEWISTA in Austria do some poster action statistics and research, and I am sure many marketing departements have a keen eye on the influence a poster has on their sales (keeping their conclusions a closely guarded secret), but it is clear to me that the academic poster community can not continue indefinitely pretending their peace posters prevent wars and their global warming poster are widely welcomed and decrease climate change, without some convincing evidence that the posters have reached an audience and caused a reaction.

  I therefore appreciate that Rolf Thalmann asks and answers the question "What happened once the poster was published in the streets?"

• The amount of material presented is substantial, is treated seriously, without ideological bias, and fun to read.

Below are some videos taken during the book launch on December 9, 2009 at the Buchhandlung Ganzoni in Basel, where Rolf Thalmann talked about some of the posters in his book, uf baseldytsch: