Walking along the streets of Yangon, Myanmar (formerly Burma), you can find sellers with tarps laid out covered in tattered paperback books. Most are in Burmese, but there are a fair number of antique books in English as well. I’ve found everything from maps to computer programming manuals to cookbooks. Once I even found a book from the 1950′s that featured illustrated instructions for performing rectal examinations.

The treasures of these displays are really in the artwork on Burmese paperbacks. Illustrators play with a wide variety of styles, but I’m most drawn to those that mix classical painting with motifs popular in the 70′s and 80′s. These are photos I took of the books collected at Pansodan Gallery in Yangon.

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