At long last our Deep Purple title Wait For The Ricochet is being reprinted and will be back in stock during May 2017 (production files are already with the printer.)  The book is substantially as before, with just typos and other small text corrections being made.  You can place a discounted pre-order now on our official shop (who will be able to supply it long before Am*z*n get their rapacious hands on it!) So if you were one of the lucky people who bought it first time around you do not need to upgrade (though if you want to we will offer you a special discount.)
Rather than plug the book ourselves, here are one-line comments from different journalists and readers of the original edition. You can read the reviews in full on the site. And if this gets you in the mood for the follow-up, the Machine Head book is on the way.

• You’ll come out of the other side of this entertaining read feeling as though there is nothing more to know about Purple’s pivotal album, such is the comprehensive and detailed breadth of material on offer.

• The book looks fantastic, chock full of rare photographs and memorabilia. It’s a joy to flick through and savour,

• I had to read it from beginning to end, couldn’t lay it aside. It’s an astonishing labour of love, so much detail and very well written.

• Simply fantastic piece of work

• A superb publication. Full of fascinating stuff;

• I was anticipating an informative read, but flipping heck, the detail and general level of love and almost but not quite reverence is to be praised.

• The attention to detail, background stories, interviews and archive photos in breathtaking.

• Flawless and immaculate

• This truly is a fantastic book.

• Hugely attractive just as an object!

• Monumental and stupendously detailed.

• Superbly illustrated.

We have now opened a subscription list for Go Home On A Postcard, the Story of Walking Pictures.  By joining this you will be kept up to date in the run up to publication which is now scheduled for Spring 2017.  There is also a site dedicated to these vintage street photographs where you can find out more.

Had another very productive meeting with the author of the Graham Bonnet biography Steve Wright again last weekend and with the aid of squishy Club biscuits (new to me!) and baps from the local sandwich shop, we managed to get the final version of the book text sorted over a four hour stint, and all the odds and ends of scans which needed dropping in.  I have now taken this version away and will do the final tidy up; things like balancing the text columns, finalising the captions, doing italics for all the quotes, clearing the rights on the last few photos, etc.   So we are almost there at long last!

It’s been a while since our last update on the Graham Bonnet Biography.  The artwork was all laid out but came in about 30 pages over the projected page count on which all the production costs are based. As the book has already been publicised we can’t change the price, and neither of us wanted to lose any of the images or text.  So I spent some time juggling the typeface, trying different fonts but not reducing the font size. This looked like it would crack the issue, but threw out all the images from the right places, so there was nothing for it but to redo the layout to correct this.  It proved very tricky in some chapters, so I met up with author Steve Wright last week and we did some of the really difficult sections together on the laptop and this work sorted the problem. Steve has done me a guide for the rest of the changes, and so we should be ready to proof it again next week.

Great little featurette about the Top Of The Pops albums on the Radio 2 Drive Time show on April 20th. We were contacted by one of the show’s researchers about mid-day ‘desperately seeking Tim’.  I got hold of Tim (author of the upcoming book When Cover Girls Ruled The Charts) and he was feeling up to it, so put them in touch. They had apparently been talking about the albums on the show the day before, so this was by way of a follow up. The DJ played a few clips of TOTPs cover versions and Tim (on a landline, there wasn’t time to get down to the nearest BBC studio for a high-quality connection) was able to fill in some of the background.

Pushed for a release date for the book, Tim announced a pre-Xmas publication this year. Now he’s on record we can hopefully – judging from the amount of pre-interest over the last couple of years – make the best-seller chart!  Mind you, someone did remind me that I had mentioned the possibility of the book way back in 2002 on the sleeve notes to a Hot Hits CD compilation (issued by RPM Records – well worth tracking down). So it has been a long time in the works.