Just a progress update on Easy On The Eye Books. Covered is continuing to get some great feedback, and orders have come from around the globe – from South America, The USA, all over Europe and Japan. Just as we were getting into our stride and not long after Covered was delivered, our print suppliers changed company name and then disappeared altogether a few weeks later, leaving just a moribund website (which one assumes will vanish when the next bill becomes due) and a few phone numbers which are never answered. This was a blow, though it seems some unlucky customers were left high and dry having parted with money for print when the company went under. So compared to them we had a lucky escape.
Since then we’ve been working hard to source a new printer for the books and have now done so. It was not easy as we prefer to print in Europe.
With this major headache out of the way final scanning work on the first of the Japanese Singles books could be completed and this book will go into production shortly. It’s certainly proving to be a visual sensory overload in many ways, page after page of great images. Each sleeve is annotated with the artist, track and record label information. Someone was looking at the material recently and wondered what the value of all the singles in the book would be today; I might find an old cigarette packet somewhere (we have some fifties ones somewhere for just this sort of task) and try to work out a rough estimate.
We will be putting some more sample pages up here soon but in the meantime enjoy another half dozen examples from bands including The Amboy Dukes, The Foundations and Fever Tree. Check our last progress report on this title here (with more examples).
Author Archives: simon robinson
Japanese sleeves
Final layout work on the Art Of Japanese Singles title is now going on. At last. The layout will feature four main sleeves per page, along with one or two smaller back-up sleeves for comparison in with the accompanying text. I must say dong the work has rekindled my own interest in the genre and I’ve not been able to resist picking up a few more covers along the way. I even found a couple on Oxfam in Huddersfield the other week at an affordable price (very unlike Oxfam! They’ve had a couple of Tracey Thorn 12″ singles in our local shop for a tenner each since last year, and they’re now getting so dog-eared even if they do drop the price to a sensible level they’ll be too scuffed to buy). There was always something very exotic about these Japanese sleeves which made them a must for collectors. I can’t be the only one who remembers trips to the legendary Flyover Records at Hammersmith to gaze at the racks full of these imports.
The book is being put together using InDesign – as a graduate of the Pagemaker school I was pushed towards this at an early stage (Adobe make great software but treat their loyal customers really badly at times) – and never got on with Quark at all. I’ve always found InDesign very stable and flexible for handling multi-page projects like this which contain a lot of linked images – 1,000 or more of them in this case.
It’s also been quite a logistical challenge just naming the files. Macs give you a lot of freedom to name image files how you like but in this case all the source archive material was carefully filed in music genres. Each genre section was given a number, and each page a number within that section, then every sleeve a number on that page. So I decided with the scanning work to reference each image using those original numbers rather than try to use artist and title. I also had to organise the scanning work precisely.
To this end I generated a sample page layout with blank boxes, printed a couple of hundred out and worked through these writing in image reference numbers, rearranging and shuffling them about, swopping images etc., until the final book worked. This then provided an exact guide for scanning. It’s almost the reverse of how Covered book was done, where we had several thousand scans to juggle. As most of this initial layout stage was done some time back it’s been a case of spending a few days refamiliarising myself with the material. I must admit there was a couple of hours of growing panic when two whole sections seemed to be missing but happily it turned out they were in with the others, and had just lost their sticky notes, so frantic scouring of the office shelves could cease!
For now, I’ll add another trio of groovy examples and then get back down to work.
Record Collector Review
A nice review of Covered in the April 2012 issue of Record Collector magazine, which also happens to be their 400th edition. I remember buying it when it was a small pocket size A5 magazine stuffed full of classified adverts from buyers and sellers, poring through on the lookout for stuff I wanted. Those days are largely gone, and the magazine is a different beast now, but still good for a browse. Anyhow, their reviewer really understood what the book was all about:
Wearing their art on their sleeves
There we were thinking that record sleeve books had been exhausted. Well, we’ve been proved wrong with this: a bizarre and well-researched project, compiling record sleeves that copy classic record sleeves. What’s great about Covered is that it’s been staring us all in the face for ages, but only now, and across 160 pages, do you realise just how much has been used and abused by so many.
Highlights and lowlights decorate every page, while the book is presented with the same graphic enthusiasm and anarchy that has created the homages in the first place. The depth and multi-genre studies that must have gone on over the years to put this together must be admired; the results are fascinating. We had no idea there were so many classic sleeve rip-offs, nor so many totally obscure ones. There are, alone, 20 sleeves mimicking Abbey Road, nine for Warhol’s VU banana and at least 19 for Never Mind The Bollocks. Mast fascinating are the unexpected oddities: hilarious homages to Saturday Night Fever, insane King Crimson send-ups. A classic folk album becomes Japanese metal deconstuctivism in a blink of an eye.
Reviewed by Jonny Trunk
More reviews
More nice reviews for Covered recently. Ubupopland is a site I visit from time to time to check his great French album covers, and they have clearly enjoyed the book – plus I like the way they’ve snapped the page spreads. The Beat is a niche magazine mostly devoted to aspects of Rock’n’Roll, R&B, Blues and other music from the 50’s, 60’s & 70’s. You can check them out at www.beat-magazine.co.uk/
Its been hard work trying to get Waterstones to stock the title, but happily the local branch has noticed the interest in the title and decided to stock it and see how it goes. At least we can now direct people locally to Sheffield’s only nationwide book store.
At the other end three indie shops are also helping out. The LP RECORD STORE on Arundel Street and VINYL DEMAND on Rockingham Street are two new specialist record shops in Sheffield, and have taken the title for us. Lastly a new second-hand book shop BOOKS ON THE PARK is stocking the book. Sited on Ecclesall Road (near Endcliffe Park – hence the name) this is a well stocked and smartly laid out shop worth a visit. They’ve even added a small vinyl rack which is fairly fatal as far as I’m concerned! They’ve only been open a few weeks, having moved across the road from their former shop as they needed more space.
On the continent, author Jan Bellekens has been having fun doing local record fairs and selling the book direct.
In The Telegraph*
* that’s the Sheffield Telegraph! But they have done the Covered book proud with a full page in the issue cover dated last Thursday. The Telegraph used to be Sheffield’s daily ‘broadsheet’, with an evening paper called The Star. The Telegraph foundered many years ago but came back as a weekly title, and has plenty of listings and local arts coverage. Anyhow their arts writer Ian Soutar has done a detailed article, which you can find here on the Telegraph website as well. It did mean I got recognised in an antiques centre the other day by someone else trawling for vinyl oddities…
Fireworks
“Covered is an eclectic collection of trivia and tackiness, lavishly illustrated and beautifully laid out, which goes some way to showing that imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Despite my love of all things Deep Purple (all up to 1976 that is, with selected tracks from thereafter) I’m not a massive listener of rock or metal (industrial is a different matter), but it was nice to see the reviewer in Fireworks Magazine – an unashamed metal glossy – taking some of my gibes in the book about rock sleeves I’m not a great admirer of in good spirit in a nice review of Covered (March / April 2012 issue). I did contact the writer and offer pistols at dawn over the Iron Maiden art, but he felt a game of scrabble might be more in order! You can read the full review here: Fireworks
More reviews
Eye Magazine, devoted to graphic design old and new, including music packaging, has done a great post on their blog about the Covered book with examples and comment. “Until I read Covered, I’d no idea just how many copycat album covers had been unleashed upon the world – good, bad and mostly very (and sometimes deliberately) ugly. But highly entertaining. Simon Robinson adds credits, witty captions and typographical critiques.”
Author Jan Bellekens has also been interviewed by more papers and Reklame Klokje have featured the story in their online edition in Belgium. You can see the story here.
More media outlets have got reviews on the way and Jonny Trunk has asked to review it for the UK magazine Record Collector. Trunk Records is a great label, unearthing and issuing many esoteric projects both on CD (such as lost theme music and advertising jingles) and in books (Jonny’s latest on Sainsbury’s own brand packaging is one of those titles which makes you want it immediately and we reviewed his book on Library Music albums on the ST33.net site a while ago).
Nice review
Nice review and comments on the Covered book from the ever wonderful Shindig Magazine on their Happening blog. “A great project and hell of a lot of fun. This is definitely a fine book to flick through when friends are over for a music session.” Read the full review at the Shindig blog; we’ll even forgive them for getting the url wrong!
“Covered” out now…
Stock of Covered has finally arrived. Everyone who pre-ordered via our online store has been sent their copies ahead of it reaching the shops. I also did a short slot on BBC Radio Sheffield about the book earlier in January. What a strange experience. Once admitted into the upstairs waiting area I was left for nearly twenty minutes gazing at faded prints of our local football teams (in better days) wondering if anyone knew I was there. They were running a radio special on back-ache, which was clearly more in tune with the listeners, so I was on air for about five minutes total (which included a record being played!) before being ushered out in time for the news. Lots of interest in the book from other media sources though, and it’ll be interesting to see what the reviewers make of it all.
Bleed!
Covered got held up a few more days when it was discovered that all my carefully prepared artwork had been converted to PDF, but in doing so I’d not clicked the “preserve bleed” option, so the printers could not proceed (when printers guillotine books down to finished size, they like a bit of overlap at the outside of the pages otherwise you risk getting white edges to your pictures). As it took me an hour to re-output then five hours to check and upload the files again, it’s a lesson I’ll not forget in a hurry! In the past I’ve used pre-set options so not had to worry about this small but important option. In the meantime, here are Deadline trying to look mean and Parallel Lines era Blondie-like!





