234 pages, paperback, 14 x 17cm. Over 200 flyers, compiled by Masala Noir, Paris. Nobody was supposed to keep these. A flyer is made to be handed out on a Tuesday, read once, and dropped in the street on the way to the show. It has a job, the job lasts about four days, and then it is rubbish. That is the whole reason this book exists and the whole reason it is worth having: what you are looking at is the accidental survival of a form designed to be thrown away.

And what a form. No budget, no client, no art director, no time. A photocopier in somebody's workplace after hours, used without permission. Letters torn out of newspapers and magazines and glued down crooked. Rub-down transfer sheets running out halfway through a word. Halftones photocopied from photocopies until the faces dissolve into pure black and pure white with nothing in between, which was never the intention and became the signature. The register slips. The staple hole punches through the O. Somebody has written the door price in biro because the price changed after printing.

This is the same logic that produced the music. The Xerox machine was to punk graphics what a borrowed four-track was to the recordings: not a compromised version of the professional tool but a different instrument entirely, with its own grain, its own failures, and its own speed. A band could decide on a show and have three hundred handbills on the street the same night. There is a direct line running back from these pages through Situationist détournement and Dada photomontage to every ransom-note letter ever cut out with kitchen scissors, but almost nobody making them was thinking about that. They were thinking about Thursday.

Masala Noir, the Paris imprint run by designer Charles Deroyan, has been quietly building one of the best ephemera archives around - rave flyers, hip-hop flyers, label logos, post-punk graphics - and this is one of its strongest volumes. The bias runs American, with Ramones, Minor Threat, Fugazi and Suicidal Tendencies among the names on the bills, so you get the whole arc from the first New York wave through hardcore and into what came after. Printed small, at roughly the scale of the things it reproduces, which is the correct decision. Blown up to coffee-table size these would look like design; at handbill scale they still look like litter, which is what they are and why they matter.

No essay, no captions, no scholarly apparatus. Just the images, one after another, which is the right call. If you work in graphics, if you promote shows, if you have ever stared at a wall of pasted-over posters and felt something, this is a reference library for twenty-five euros. Get it before it goes.