Welcome to the 2023 Neon Speaks Online Book Fair!
Each year we curate a special list of books for the Neon Speaks Festival. Browse the books below that celebrate the connective power of vintage signs and popular culture.

SAN FRANCISCO NEON:
SURVIVORS AND LOST ICONS

A lush portrait of San Francisco’s historic neon landscape.
Authors: Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Cloth hardcover book with 200+ photographs. Features include:

• San Francisco/photography essay by local award-winning travel writer Tom Downs.
• Neon preservation essay by Eric Lynxwiler, neon sign art expert and board president of the Museum of Neon Art (MONA).
• Endnotes section with local stories, oral history, and rich details on 45 iconic neon signs by photographers and essayists.
• Index by neighborhood to give readers a sense of which neighborhoods still have clusters of neon, and which neighborhoods have lost all but one or two surviving signs.
• Neon condition to give readers indication which signs are illuminated nightly, which signs do not light up and need restoration, and which signs are lost icons.

“Just when you thought you knew everything about San Francisco, along comes a new book, San Francisco Neon: Survivors and Lost Icons. With beautiful photography, paging through is like strolling down the streets of a familiar city with a new vantage point. You’ll never look at San Francisco streets in quite the same way again. If just one of these neon survivors gets saved from demolition, this book is a huge success.”
—Andrew Danish, author of Palm Springs Weekend (Chronicle Books)

SAVING NEON:
A BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Release Date: November 2018, Giant Orange Press
Authors: Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan
Soft cover, 40 pages, full color

Is there a neon sign in your neighborhood edging toward oblivion? This guidebook gives you the information you need to kick into conservation mode to “save the sign” using neon best practices. Includes resource links and organizations to contact for support. There is a growing national movement to protect neon neighborhood icons threatened by neglect, refacing, or removal.

Funding for the Neon Speaks Symposium and this guidebook made possible by a San Francisco Heritage Alice Ross Carey grant and a matching grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

NEON: A LIGHT HISTORY

Release Date: March 2021, Giant Orange Press
Authors: Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein
Soft cover, 90 pages, full color, 8.5 x 11 trim size

About this book:
Is it possible that (once again) everything we know is wrong? Well, in regards to the history of neon, this may well be the case. Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein have penned a brief, but concise history of the neon sign beginning at the beginning, and covering scandals, murder, fascists, and forgotten inventors. A full-color, lavishly illustrated electrical bodice ripper, aficionados of neon will find this an indispensable “bible” to the history of their favorite collision of art and commerce.

NEON ICONS

Exhibition Catalog for San Francisco Neon Survivors and Icons from the Archives
Release Date: November 2015, Giant Orange Press
Authors: Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan
Soft cover, 40 pages, full color

A local favorite, this is a catalog of an exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch in 2015. The current day photographs and historic images in this catalog exemplify the rich history of commercial neon signage that once graced the commercial corridors of San Francisco. The majority of the iconic images were culled from the photo archive in San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center. We are fortunate that these photo archives exist, they preserve a historic perspective on the evolution of the city we call home.