This is a replica of AKAY  's first blackbook . Production of the original began in the fall of 1986 when 16-year-old AKAY spray-pasted a color swatch card onto the first page of a nondescript, standard-size sketchbook. Through his nightly additions of sketches, photos and newspaper clippings up until the spring of 1990, the personal document of a prolific graffiti writer became this rather incidental chronicle of an era in Stockholm graffiti.

There is a brief gap in Akay's meticulous record, which was made just before Christmas 1988 when his father confiscated the black book and locked it in a bank safe. His father threatened to throw it in the fire if Akay didn't stop painting graffiti. A few weeks after the Blackbook was taken hostage, two police officers showed up at AKAY's father's house with a search warrant. AKAY and WEIRD were ordered to wait in the kitchen while the police searched AKAY's basement room looking for any evidence they could bring against him - photos or sketches, or better yet, all that evidence pasted into a book, along with the dates and places written alongside the works. But thanks to his father's failed parental blackmail attempts (rather than his father's wife, who kept offering cops coffee and refreshments), police found nothing incriminating. The only slightly suspicious thing police could find was an elaborately arranged display of 280 brightly colored spray cans, AKAY's most prized possession at the time - second only to the imprisoned Blackbook - that lit up his windowless room.

Now, over 30 years later, long after the content can be used as evidence of criminal crimes or manipulative parenting tactics, the black book from AKAY's teenage years has been reproduced and made accessible for the first time. This is the second edition.

The fold-out pages come in a packaging with instructions for gluing. 

Dimensions: 34 x 25 cm