Embedded flush into the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and as far south as Santiago and Buenos Aires are hundreds of hand-cut linoleum plaques bearing the same manifesto: TOYNBEE IDEA / IN MOVIE 2001 / RESURRECT DEAD / ON PLANET JUPITER. Nobody saw them being installed. One obsessive investigator spent a decade chasing shortwave transmissions, a reclusive shut-in, and a car with a hole cut in its floor. He may have solved it. He can't prove it.
The anchor: what the tiles say, how they're made from layered linoleum and tar paper, and how they seemingly install themselves into hot asphalt without anyone ever being caught.
A clean walkthrough of the phenomenon and its strange grammar — the Kubrick reference, the philosopher Arnold Toynbee, and the deranged 'sidebar' tiles railing against the media.
Goes deep on the geographic spread and the escalating paranoia of the later tiles, which accused named organizations of conspiring to suppress the resurrection idea.
The 2011 Sundance-winning documentary that turned a street curiosity into a genuine detective story, following three Philadelphians as they reverse-engineer the tiler's identity.
The self-taught artist and punk who spent over a decade cataloguing tiles, decoding a 1980s shortwave rant, and staking out a South Philly rowhouse to find the tiler.
A richly illustrated overview that captures why the tiles refuse to die — including copycats still appearing years after the suspected original tiler went silent.
A community catalogue mapping every known tile, its location, condition, and the moment it vanished under a repaving crew. The closest thing to a field guide for the obsessed.