And but so?

April 16, 2012 8:01 PM

I'm looking for examples of novels, other than Infinite Jest, which have spawned this sort of shirt.

And what would you call that sort of literary homage across one's chest?
I'm not looking for LOTR or other books which have generated or established iconography along the way, but rather if you can find examples of other novels that have crossed the leap of abstraction into apparel, without any previous established graphic cues.

posted by Cold Lurkey to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

not sure if any of the references on this page are literary, but here's a history of that particular shirt style.
posted by raihan_ at 8:09 PM on April 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

You may not be looking for information about that particular design of shirt, but the one you referenced may have started as "John & Paul & Ringo & George" shirts for the Beatles (see here). The site linked above shows a bunch of derivative designs for other groups with similar typography.
posted by betafilter at 8:11 PM on April 16, 2012

Tom Robbins
posted by AlliKat75 at 8:13 PM on April 16, 2012

Response by poster: To clarify, while I'm glad to know the history of that particular style, there are many many IJ t-shirts out there, that happened to be the one I saw that triggered my curiosity.
I'm wanting to know, mainly, if Infinite Jest is exceptional in crossing the jersey curtain this way.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 8:19 PM on April 16, 2012

Game of Thrones!
posted by supercres at 8:22 PM on April 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

snorgtees.com/ has t-shirts that reference Game of Thrones (I'm really thinking about getting Winter Is Coming). And an old boyfriend once gave me a sweat shirt that said "Go to hell, I"m reading" quoting the first Nero Wolff book. I think a local book shop that specialized in mystery novels had them made up. I don't know what you'd call then though. Literary apparel maybe?
posted by BoscosMom at 8:32 PM on April 16, 2012

I think that Lord of the Rings t-shirts are probably good candidates for "first mass-market literary t-shirts." They were certainly the first ones I saw.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:35 PM on April 16, 2012

Wait, now I'm confused. Your example shirt took an existing design and adapted it to fit obscure-ish references to IJ. Do you mean other shirts with the same sort of thing with other books, or with that particular design, or just shirts with subtle references to books?
posted by supercres at 8:36 PM on April 16, 2012

What about Lovecraft? Miskatonic University shirts are ubiquitous (so much so that I refused to link to any of the hundred examples on Zazzle). I don't know the history of these shirts but I would bet that they predate the publication of IJ.
posted by cabingirl at 8:42 PM on April 16, 2012

I'm talking about the Lord of the Rings shirts that just had quotations from the book, like "Not all who wander are lost," with no visual referents.

Also, "Who is John Galt?" shirts were popular in the 1970s. Again, these were just the text.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:50 PM on April 16, 2012

I didn't see it on the history page raihan_ linked to above, but I seem to remember the first shirt in that style was about the basketball team UNLV had at one point, many, many years ago. The first iterations seemed to be mostly about basketball, before, my god, they just exploded. I honestly had no idea about non-basketball versions past the Beatles shirts.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:03 PM on April 16, 2012

Lots of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shirts in the 1980s and 1990s just had text references, too. "42", "Don't Panic," and "Mostly Harmless" were the most popular.

But my guess is that either "Not all who wander are lost" or "Who is John Galt?" was the first.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:55 PM on April 16, 2012

Hayduke Lives! from Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.
posted by workerant at 9:12 AM on April 17, 2012