Street art borrowed the wall from graffiti and gave it back with pictures on it. Stencils, paste-ups, murals and mosaics now cover whole districts, and the arguments about them are as lively as the work: who may paint a wall, who profits when a neighbourhood becomes beautiful, and whether a picture made without permission can ever belong in a museum. In our guide to street art, the image-based cousin of graffiti, we traced the form from Blek le Rat’s Paris rats to Newark’s mile-long mural and the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince. The five books below carry that story further.

The list moves from the histories to the pictures to the argument. Two books survey the form and place it in art history, one preserves the landmark exhibition that turned street art into a mass-audience subject, one is the artist’s own page-by-page statement, and one asks the legal and civic questions that our guide only begins to raise. Together they give you the images, the arguments and the vocabulary to look at a wall and know what you are seeing.

Histories of the form

1. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution by Cedar Lewisohn

Cedar Lewisohn wrote this book as the companion to the street art exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008, the show that put six street artists on the museum’s river facade, and it still reads as one of the clearest introductions to the form. He surveys the main techniques and the artists associated with them, with a sharp eye for how street art grew out of graffiti and then away from it.

Its great virtue is proportion. The New York roots, the Paris stencil tradition and the London scene each get their due without any one of them taking over, and the book is generously illustrated, so you can see what the descriptions mean. If you want the shape of the whole field before choosing where to specialise, this is the best single place to begin.

2. Graffiti and Street Art by Anna Waclawek

Anna Waclawek is an art historian, and her contribution to the World of Art series from Thames and Hudson is a compact, readable history that follows the form from 1970s New York to its global present. She is especially good on the questions that cause the most confusion: where graffiti ends and street art begins, how the market and the museum changed both, and why artists so often move between the wall and the gallery.

The World of Art format is deliberately short, which makes the book a good companion to the larger and more image-heavy titles on this list. It gives you the dates, the names and the critical vocabulary in a form you can finish in a weekend, and it supports the distinctions our own guide draws between the letter, the picture and the mural.

The catalogue and the monograph

3. Art in the Streets by Jeffrey Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose

This is the catalogue of the 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that broke attendance records and, for many people, settled the argument about whether street art belonged in a museum. Its editors gathered a very wide range of work, from the New York subways and Keith Haring’s drawings to stencils, posters and murals, and the book lays that story out as a generous visual survey.

As a catalogue it is heavy on images and generous with essays, and it is the volume to reach for when you want to see how many different practices have been collected under one name. It also tells you something about the people behind it. The show’s curators came from galleries, publishing and the culture itself rather than from the academy, and the book carries that energy on every page.

4. Wall and Piece by Banksy

Banksy’s book is both a monograph and a manifesto. It pulls together his earlier books, adds new material, and puts his stencils, his museum pranks and his dry captions between two covers. If you want to understand how one anonymous artist turned a stencil and a good joke into the best-known name in the form, the pages are the evidence.

The book matters for another reason: its short texts return again and again to the street as a place that belongs to the people who walk it, and to the difference between art made to be owned and art made to be seen. That argument sits at the centre of our guide. It is also the quickest way to meet the stencil tradition that Blek le Rat began in Paris, a debt Banksy has acknowledged openly.

The argument

5. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination by Alison Young

Alison Young is a criminologist, and her book asks the questions that murals and stencils raise for the law and for cities: who may paint where, what counts as damage and what counts as a gift, and how public authorities decide which images are art and which are crime. Where most books on this list ask what street art looks like, hers asks what it does to a city.

It is the most academic title here and the most useful companion to the fault line our guide describes, the one that runs through the word permission. Young shows how the same wall can be a crime in one year and a commissioned work in the next, and her argument that street art changes how people experience public space is hard to unsee once you have read it.

Final thoughts

Read together, these five books cover the whole conversation. Lewisohn and Waclawek give you the history and the vocabulary, Art in the Streets shows what the form looked like when a major museum finally opened its doors, Banksy supplies the artist’s own voice, and Young asks who gets to decide what a public wall is for. They all confirm what our guide argues: street art is best understood as public illustration, seen by thousands of people who never chose to open the book.

Start with whichever door suits you, the images or the argument, and then walk the streets with what you have learned. Ask who a piece is for, what it wants you to feel in the two seconds you have, and whether it uses the wall, the doorway or the pipe. For the neighbouring forms, our companion reading lists on graffiti and guerilla art follow the same path from letters to unannounced interventions.