Doug Rice was a student at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., when one day, he took a break from studying to visit the bathroom. It was there that he made his life-changing discovery.

"I was using the bathroom and someone wrote on the wall, 'Rick Moranis has enormous horse balls,' " Rice said. "It was at that moment, in my disbelief that someone would write such a claim, that I got the idea to write the book."

The book he's talking about is From the Stall, a chronicle of some of the most insightful pieces of graffiti recorded on the walls of Michigan universities' public bathroom stalls, among other locales. He calls the book a "bathroom reader" -- a coffee table book for the bathroom.

For college students, public bathrooms are nearly unavoidable, and with public bathrooms come graffiti. Sometimes thoughtful and sometimes idiotic, toilet stall sentiment is almost always short-lived, lasting only until the next time the walls are cleaned.

Despite the artistic potential of bathroom wall graffiti, not everyone appreciates it. Ron Nagle, custodial programs manager at the Penn State Office of Physical Plant, said graffiti artists' efforts would be better directed at more traditional and non-destructive media.

"It's destructive because [a bathroom wall] is not a writing surface," Nagle said.

Nagle said the university has devoted time and money to thwarting bathroom vandals, including covering stalls with a removable film in order to protect the wall beneath.

"It's a problem because normally they use materials that we can't remove," Nagle said. "We usually have to repaint."

Nagle said although the graffiti around Penn State's bathrooms is difficult to remove, bathrooms are generally kept free of vandalism.

Of the writing that does appear, some is quite memorable. For example, a now-lost inscription from a Pattee Library men's room: "Miles sucks!" wrote one toilet-stall poet, apparently referring to someone named Miles who, ostensibly, sucks.

"Yeah! Metric rules!" was the hilariously misguided response.

Sometimes, the tone is more poetic.

"I went to college to buy some time/Man, that s*** was expensive," wrote one artist in a basement bathroom in Sparks Building.

The message may even be succinct, if not a little cryptic, as evidenced by bold letters across a third-floor Sackett Building stall, which read "Sasquatch Hunter."

Drawing from past bathroom experiences like these, Rice realized that stalls were an untapped artistic resource.

"There's gotta be tons of just off-the-wall stuff that people would write on the bathroom wall," Rice said.

The book consists of 145 full-color pages, filled with photographs of funny, artistic or thought-provoking graffiti on the walls of public bathrooms. After his book was rejected from several publishing companies, Rice decided to self-publish the book and sell it online. He released it about three weeks ago, and it's available for $14.99 at www.fromthestall.com.

"There's all sorts of stuff. There's definitely a wide spread," Rice said. "There's some thought-provoking stuff in there. There's a lot of funny stuff."

Rice did most of the photography himself at colleges around Michigan. He also included photos sent to him by friends from bathrooms in Boston and Greece, among other places.

Rice said From the Stall includes a section for would-be graffiti artists to try their hand before going pro.

"There's a cool part of the book at the end called 'Shooting Blanks,' which is a close-up of a stall wall with nothing written on it," Rice said. "If you live in an apartment and you share a bathroom, you can write stuff back and forth to each other [in the book]."