Anyone who fancies any A5 flyers for the Covered book let us know. We’re sending a wedge to the two main distributors but if any shops want some we’ve done extra. In the meantime, here are some worthy examples of people getting carried away by Saturday Night Fever.

Easy On The Eye Books have designed a computer monitor desktop background pattern to be used on your Mac. It has 40 of the best copy covers, all based on famous rock and pop sleeves, and you can have fun seeing if your friends can spot them all.

The desktop image is optimised to work at a monitor resolution of 1280 X 1024 pixels, though it will work on smaller screens. You can download the image (file size 1.2MB) free using the link below (the image above is just a sample); once you’ve gone to the page, just drag the full-size image over to your existing desktop. Once it is on your hard-drive, use your System Preferences menu to go to the Desktop and Screensaver options and navigate to the saved image to use it. It’ll work on a PC but you’ll need to ask someone else how.
Note this is a desktop pattern which is there while your using your machine, NOT a screensaver. Once it’s up and running, feel free to send us a snapshot of it on site…

Click here for the file.

Following up a lead from author Tim Joseph, we have been in contact with a photographer who actually worked on a few of the later Top Of The Pops sleeves. At our request Nigel, the photographer in question,  filled us in on how the job was approached and delivered, but for us the real excitement was that he had kept all the out-takes from the sessions. Some of the images will appear in the book of course thanks to Nigel’s generosity but after some discussion he has also has agreed to license four limited edition photographs available to collectors exclusively through Easy On The Eye.

These eye-popping images are real photographs too, and suitable for framing. The quality is stunning as these are taken directly off the original large format slides, unseen for three decades. We will have more details very soon when the new Easy On The Eye store goes live. In the meantime here’s a sample to be going on with.

A few Top Of The Pops album collectors have noticed a full set of the albums being sold online, and Terry Wilson has been keeping an eye on it. Apparently the owner put the set up for sale as a complete set only, and asked a large sum for it (it may have been as high as £1500!).
It didn’t sell needless to say (there is a tendency these days for a few sellers to ‘try it on’ at first, just in case someone with more money than sense is surfing) and was readvertised shortly afterwards at a straight auction and reached the reserve of £150, and was sold for this. Which is a pretty good price really, considering the last few albums alone can spark bidding wars now from people keen to finish their set off.
Then the set reappeared for sale again, supposedly due to the earlier buyer backing out, and with a new price of £500 – buy it now. Which is a lot to shell out in one go, it works out at about a fiver a pop. I had a look at the auction, and was surprised to see the seller note that the set was actually missing one album which he’d mislaid. On the other hand he was throwing in a batch of related albums, Best Ifs, Tots etc.

We have added progress report on the forthcoming titles to keep people up to speed. In the meantime our sister site ST33, which looks at all aspects of record sleeve cover art, has had a bit of fun by imagining how the TOTPs covers might have looked if they had begun earlier, and ended later. The mock-up here is for a 1959 edition!

Easy On The Eye have curated a modest display of walking picture images and cards which opened at Easter 2011. The idea for this display arose after contacting East Riding of Yorkshire Council, and curators at Sewerby Hall and Gardens, who were helpful in furnishing me with information and images they held regarding the Snaps company and William Foster-Brigham, who operated in Bridlington, for the upcoming book. The exhibition is now confirmed as running until August 3rd 2011. The images on display are largely from the Easy On The Eye collection of Walking Pictures. Radio 4’s Making History programme did a piece about the exhibition and walking pictures in their May 31 broadcast. Check the Walking Pictures page on this site for more on the book. For more on the exhibition visit Snaps Walking Pictures.

The album sleeve art blog ST33 has recently had a bit of fun with the Top Of The Pops sleeves. As well as an ongoing gallery to show off all 92 of the album sleeves, they have also speculated what the cover might have looked like had the series both began back in the fifties, and continued through to recent times. A number of artist’s impressions have been posted on the site under their Top Of The Pops gallery section, along with appropriate track listings.

The ups and downs of Jan getting his work over to us would probably make a book on their own! And it wasn’t just a case of Mac versus PC blues either. We tried sending some trial pages via the web but there were software issues which Jan was eventually able to overcome. The sheer amount of data then saw Jan burning some material to CDR and shipping this over, which helped. I then had the bright idea of suggesting he get a hard drive and copy everything to that, then just ship it across.

When it arrived it looked fine, but was a European round pin plug fit. None of my cables fitted the hard drive, so I zoomed down to Maplin to see if they could sell me something which would work without blowing the unit. They stroked their collective chins a few times and pointed out some very expensive units which might do the job. “Or you could just buy a round pin adapter for £4.99 Sir….”

This problem solved, I tried the hard drive on three Macs and it wouldn’t load successfully on any. However the computers did recognise that there was a drive, indicating that all was not lost. So rather than struggle on myself, I asked our local Sheffield Mac experts at IT Solutions to take over. They were also a bit puzzled, but thought there might have been some minor damage in transit. Happily they were eventually able to get the data off the disc onto a Mac, and then onto a new hard drive which I then brought home … and works fine.

Over the Christmas break I have been going through the files and the sheer amount of research which has gone into collecting this material is almost overwhelming. I am now preparing some test pages for Jan to approve before we steam in and put the final artwork together.

We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve admired in-store posters and displays for books, records and exhibitions, only to be rebuffed in our attempts to obtain copies for ourselves (and, it has to be said, sometimes resorting to underhand means to secure them – so no Bridget Riley posters were on sale in Liverpool in 2010, but they were fixed to the door of the ladies toilet – if only briefly).

With this in mind, Easy On The Eye are planning to let people have the opportunity to purchase any of our display material through a new on-line store. This will include posters as well as exclusive prints and photographs. The store will also enable people to buy books direct from us in case of difficulty. We will announce details here shortly.

With a record label founded in the very early 1950s, when a book on the world’s first spoken-word label Caedmon Records was first mooted we were very pleased to find both the label founders still active, interested and fully au fait with modern technology, and they have both been generous with sharing their recollections and answering questions. We were impressed to discover that one of the label’s founders, Marianne Mantell, was answering her emails from on board a ship and would be in the UK briefly as part of a cruise voyage this month. She suggested we come over when the boat docked in Liverpool and talk face to face to share her memories of this exciting label.

The archive photograph here shows the label founders and two of their recordings stars in 1972. L-R Barbara Holdridge, Julie Harris, Marianne Mantell and Claire Bloom.

We will report back on the interview shortly. You can read about the title under the In The Pipeline section