Doug Rice’s “From the Stall” is raunchy, homophobic, sexist and racist and offends every sense of common decency most readers have. Somewhere within the pages of the book lies the interesting concept of recording and analyzing graffiti found on the walls of public restrooms. Each page of “From the Stall” consists of a glossy photograph of bathroom wall graffiti, accompanied by a sentence or two of commentary from Rice. There is a potential here for truly witty commentary or analysis, and I found myself wanting to know who created this graffiti or if there were observable trends by time, location or establishment. But mostly it’s just a lot of poop jokes.

Anyone who has had the joy of reading the multilingual debates in the stalls of Van Hise can attest to the idea that a book exploring the strange impulses that drive people to scrawl inanities on the walls of bathrooms could provide an interesting analysis of the human psyche indeed. Rice acknowledges this concept in the prologue to his book, writing that the atmosphere of bathroom stalls “reveals a freedom that transforms our reality … [and] uncovers a side of our mentality that is perverse, raunchy and distasteful.” While this arguably excuses the content of the book, it cannot excuse Rice’s poor analysis.

Instead of having real content, “From the Stall” features jokes about Rice’s own excretory functions and bad puns like “Pablo Picasshole,” “Edgar Allen Poo” and, most intolerably, “Shakespoop.” The biggest letdown of Rice’s book is that it focuses on a very small sample, with most of the photographs coming from three universities and oftentimes multiple shots of the same bathroom. This lack of exploration comes across as laziness, especially when Rice includes photos of graffiti with content that is racist, homophobic or otherwise offensive without any real criticism or other analytical commentary. Another inexplicable inclusion is a photo of a pair of soiled underwear lying next to a toilet, and though Rice argues that he “had to include this pic,” there is no explanation or imaginable reason as to why.

“From the Stall” does have its moments, and occasionally Rice’s witticisms offer up a chuckle. For example Rice writes, “I just wanted to point out that this was written by a college student,” in reference to one man’s particularly banal celebration of his various bodily functions. The handful of amusing moments, however, does not make up for the derogatory statements and full-page pornographic drawings. Though Rice did not create the images himself, he has a responsibility to respond to a few of the especially offensive images. Unfortunately, his commentary on the most heinous images tends to drop any attempt at humor and fall back on crutch phrases such as “Wow,” “Unbelievable,” “I agree with you,” “Oh snap” and “I have no response to this.” The latter of these statements is the most perplexing — if something doesn’t merit any response then that lack of response probably shouldn’t be published.

In fact, that sums this book up pretty well. There is no conceivable reason why this book was published or why anyone should seek it out. This book has almost zero content and offends far more often than it entertains. Perhaps that was Rice’s goal, but if that’s the case, there is still no reason to purchase images of the kind of offensive graffiti you probably see pretty frequently anyway.

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1/2 star out of 5

Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 8, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. to remove a name from the story.