“The police post themselves at the School of Fine Arts – the Fine Arts’ students poster
the streets.” An anonymous poster from the Paris student uprisings of May 1968

40 years ago next month, the streets of the French capital saw workers and students protesting against the increasing levels of unemployment and poverty that were all too apparent under Charles de Gaulle’s conservative government. As a reminder of the power of self-initiated protest, May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion, launches this Thursday at the Hayward Project Space in London and brings together a range of handmade posters that were used to convey the protestors’ grievances during the uprisings. Before the show opens, we talked to the exhibition’s organiser and curator, Johan Kugelberg, about how this vibrant and uncompromising graphic art came about and what it means today…

Borders bookshop has a “Real Lives” section. Waterstones ups the ante with “Painful Lives”. Amazon’s catch-all is the more enigmatic “True Endurance and Survival”. But earlier this week I found myself in the “Tragic Life Stories” aisle of WHSmiths. After taking in that, yes, a whole section of shelving had actually been given over to this subject, it struck me that while each book pertained to be a traumatic tale of an individual, they were marketed in such a way as to look entirely the same. Unlike the covers within the nearby Crime section, where even the most conventional might feature a gun, a knife, or something vaguely noir-ish; within Tragic Life Stories there is, apparently, no need to differentiate details. Each one is a tragic tale; each one has the same cover: a child’s face and a scrawled, handwritten title.

Ha – only joking. While Banksy is a relative newcomer to the graffiti scene, Blek le Rat has been stencilling, pasting and daubing his way around the world for nearly thirty years. But the perception of Banksy as the pioneer of street art is certainly the one favoured by the media and the art world. As a result, Banksy’s artistic reputation – no doubt helped by his anonymity – has been elevated to near mythical status. While Blek’s reputation, at least beyond the world of street art, is far less well known, a new book of his work looks certain to bring his art to a wider audience and throw up a few more questions on just how influential he’s been.

Penguin Books has commissioned Shepard Fairey of Obey to create two new book covers - for two George Orwell classics: Animal Farm and 1984.

Princess Tolstoya, 1800-1873

Edinburgh-based photographer Joanna Kane’s latest book, The Somnambulists, is a series of rather unconventional portraits. While at first glance the images appear to be intimate studies of various sleeping figures they are, in fact, recent photographs of life and death masks that are between 150 and 200 years old.

Although submissions are now closed, you can still vote on the ideas submitted for our Coversourcing competition to design the UK jacket for Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book