In what is believed to be an industry first, the entire text of a book billed as “a practical guide to resisting the rise of totalitarianism” is to be fly-posted along an east London street next week.

US historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, out next week, is to be reproduced chapter by chapter in a series of 20 eye-catching posters pasted along Leonard Street, near Silicon Roundabout. The posters, designed by Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean and her team with students at Kingston University, will appear in sequence on Monday along the road, which is at the heart of the capital’s creative community.

Describing the book as “an attempt to distil what I have learned about the 20th century into a guide for action today”, the Yale professor said: “I can’t think of anything like this that has been done with anyone’s work before.”

He added that it was doubtful such a distillation would have been possible with his previous works, which include Bloodlands and Black Earth, both of which come in at over 400 pages, compared with On Tyranny’s 130.

In the book, the professor, who specialises in European history and the Holocaust, mixes modern history with practical lessons on how to resist tyranny. It was prompted, he said, by the shock and sense of helplessness felt by many over recent political developments in the US and UK. Utilising examples of resistance against Hitler and Stalin, each chapter includes acts of defiance readers can integrate into their daily life.

Snyder intended the book be used as “a manifesto and manual” in the fight against rising populism on both sides of the Atlantic, a situation he described as “urgent”.

Poster four in the Timothy Snyder On Tyranny campaign.

“I will be more than happy if the posters themselves convey its message,” he added. “We have become unused to the stakes being high, but they are: those who control the executive branch of the US government want a regime change in my country, and the basic sense of freedom that many of us have come to take for granted in the west is under threat.”

William Smith, creative manager at Snyder’s publisher Vintage, said: “We believe it’s the first time anyone has done this to launch a book.” He said On Tyranny was a book that would get word-of-mouth recommendation, but “you need to get that word-of-mouth going”.

The east London street was chosen because “every other person around there uses Instagram and Twitter”, Smith said. It is expected that photographs of the eye-catching designs – modelled on 1930s propaganda – will be shared on social media.

Though Snyder praised the campaign, he admitted it took time for him to understand how it would work. “Any publication means the transformation of ideas into an object,” he explained. Describing the posters as “in effect a second kind of publication of the book” and its transformation from 20 lessons about tyranny into 20 original pieces of art, he said: “I didn’t grasp that until I saw the wonderful posters. This is not so much the promotion of the book as another realisation of it, free of charge in the public space.”

Was he worried when he didn’t understand it? No, he said: “Marx said that the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”