Excellent to find comedian Stewart Lee indulging in a bit of crate digging at The Big Difference venue in Leicester on the 14th, as he dropped by to look and chuckle at Steve’s worst album covers which are currently decorating the place for the duration of the Leicester Comedy Festival. Stewart was playing that evening at the De Montfort Hall so it was really good of him to spare the time, and after a few words from Steve the collector, Stewart read aloud from his book introduction and had invited guests chuckling away. Always great to be chatting with vinyl fans and thanks to Fern who organised this for us. There is still time to catch author Simon’s illustrated talk on the worst album covers which will be at lunchtime on Saturday 22nd February but while this is free you MUST book a seat in advance through the Leicester Comedy Festival website as numbers are restricted.

Our book The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve can be found on the site.

Thanks to everyone who has placed a pre-order on Boom Boom / The Blues Photographs of Brian Smith. There is still time to do so and we will be sending another newsletter out about this to everyone next week, but wanted to wish everyone who looks in on this site all the best for the New Year. We managed to put some time in on another upcoming title in between eating home made mince pies and watching Wallace & Gromit, and the fruits of that work will figure here shortly. Right now it’s time to get the snow shovel out; the printer has some proofs for me to look at and it’s a steep drive!

Couple of new spreads from the as yet still unscheduled Go Home On A Postcard book. The pages above show a pair of young women, likely sisters, enjoying themselves in Great Yarmouth in the Fifties, along with three young women on a break in Blackpool actually during World War Two. The trendy white rimmed sunglasses influenced by Hollywood publicity photos give this quite a spooky look. Below is a spread of these commercial street portraits taken in and around Skegness in the 1950s, family groups – up to eight people in one shot – heading for the beach judging by the tin buckets visible in most of the shots!

With our next title (Boom Boom) heading for the printers any day, this book has now become a priority, especially with an exhibition in the offing. However frustratingly the software has gone and corrupted all the image links in the artwork, so I have first got to relink all 350+ scans before moving on to final production work! This seems to be something to do with me having updated the InDesign software a couple of times since starting the project, and there seem to be no easy work rounds, so I best get on with it… You can sign up for a newsletter using the link above to get the latest news.

More page spreads on the site.

The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve is now lodged in the archives of the British Library, so future mad album art researchers can peruse it at their leisure! These days publishers have to send the library six copies of each new title, the rest are then shipped on to the national libraries in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with two more going to Cambridge University (my Mum would be proud, that’s where she went!) and the Bodleian in Oxford. It’s a clever scheme though it often takes a prompt from their legal deposit department for us to remember to do it! Sadly donating books like this does not give us any sort of a discount if we wish to use the British Library resources in turn; it’s still £31 (pre-covid prices) for them to send me one snap of an album sleeve from their collection…

So, for one of our upcoming titles we’re hoping to get over to the storage library at Boston Spa (above) and take some photos ourselves, now the dreaded cyber attack closures appear to be under control. And I am more than excited about plans to open extra facilities in Leeds at the utterly marvellous Temple Works, abandoned for decades by the thickies at the council. Let’s hope this doesn’t go under Rachel Reeves mad austerity mk 2 agenda.