Guerilla art is the hardest of the urban arts to put on a shelf, because the best of it disappears. A garden planted on a vacant lot, a knitted sleeve on a railing, a poster that stays up for a month: these are works meant to be met by accident, and most of them leave nothing behind but a photograph and a story. In our guide to guerilla art, the surprise in public space, we followed the form from the Green Guerillas’ seed grenades to Charging Bull and the carnival streets of Jacmel. The five books below are where those stories were told, and in three cases they are also instruction manuals.

The list covers the territory our guide mapped. Three of these books are practical: a field manual for small anonymous acts, a handbook for gardening where nobody asked you to, and a guide to yarn bombing with patterns included. Two are portraits of what the form can do at scale, one through three decades of posters aimed at the art world and one through the Haitian carnival, where the oldest guerilla art in the Americas still takes over the street every February.

Handbooks for the street

1. The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith

Keri Smith’s kit is the title our guide ends on, and for good reason. It is a spiral-bound handbook of ideas for small, anonymous acts of art in public space, written for anyone with a free afternoon and a roll of tape. Smith keeps the ambitions human-sized and the instructions plain, and the result is a book that makes the form feel available to everyone rather than reserved for a few daring specialists.

What it teaches, more than any single technique, is the question our guide leaves you with: where would this work belong, and who would meet it there? It treats public space as something you are allowed to imagine differently. It is half instruction manual and half permission slip, and it is the one title on this list you can put to use the day it arrives.

2. On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries by Richard Reynolds

Richard Reynolds is a London gardener who began planting neglected corners of his own neighbourhood and went on to help build a worldwide community of people doing the same. His book is part handbook and part history. It offers practical advice on choosing a plot and planting it, and it follows the movement through its heroes, its habits and its quarrels.

For readers of our guide it is the natural sequel to the Liz Christy story. The Green Guerillas turned a rubble-filled lot at Bowery and Houston into New York’s first community garden, and Reynolds shows how that act of planting without permission became a global practice. It is an unusually good-humoured book about land, ownership and the pleasure of making a neglected place bloom, and it makes a persuasive case that a flower bed can be as political as a poster.

Yarn, posters and protest

3. Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain

Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain wrote an early and influential book on yarn bombing, treating it as both a practice and a piece of art history. It follows the form from its first experiments to the knitted lampposts, bicycles and bus shelters that now turn up in cities around the world, with photographs of the work and the voices of the people who make it. As our guide notes, it is one of the few urban arts dominated by women.

It is also a working manual, with patterns and projects that range from a simple sleeve for a pole to larger installations, so a reader can move from admiring the form to trying it. The tone is warm and playful, but the idea underneath is the same one that drives every guerilla work in this list: a small act of care, placed where nobody expected it, can change how a street feels.

4. Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly by the Guerrilla Girls

The anonymous collective that began in New York in 1985 with posters counting how many women the galleries showed has been refining its method for more than three decades, and this book gathers the evidence. It collects their posters, stunts and campaigns, and it tells the story of how a handful of people in gorilla masks made the art world face its own numbers.

It naturally includes the 1989 Metropolitan Museum poster our guide discusses, the one that asked whether women had to be naked to get into the museum, along with later projects that took the same method to film and politics. It is a manual of tactics as much as a history: a fact, a joke and a mask, aimed at the institutions that had the power to change.

The carnival street

5. Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti by Leah Gordon

Leah Gordon’s photographs take you to Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast, where the pre-Lenten carnival turns the streets into a moving satire. The book is a visual record of the masks, costumes and characters, from devils and dragons to figures that comment directly on politics and power, and it makes the case that the Kanaval is among the oldest and most inventive forms of public art in the Americas, the same claim our guide makes.

Gordon, an artist and curator who co-founded the Ghetto Biennale with the sculptor André Eugène, as we note in our street art guide, has spent years working in Haiti, and it shows in the care with which she records both the makers and what they are saying. For a magazine that reads the Caribbean and its diaspora closely, it is the book on this list closest to home, and it makes the strongest case that the street can answer to no one for a single glorious day.

Final thoughts

Read together, these five books show how wide the form really is. Smith and Reynolds hand you the tools, Moore and Prain show what soft materials can do on a hard street, the Guerrilla Girls show what a poster and a number can do to a museum, and Gordon reminds us that the oldest version of all is a mask in a Haitian street. They confirm the point our guide ends on: guerilla art works best when it stops being noticed as art and starts being treated as how things are.

Pick the book closest to your own street, whether that is a vacant lot, a lamppost or a poster-sized idea, and decide what you would put where. If you want to follow the urban arts further, our companion reading lists on graffiti and street art cover the letters and the pictures that share the same walls.