VIA PRESS RELEASE | While contemplating future acquisitions, audiophiles among us need look no further than Dave Thompson’s The Ultimate Guide to Vinyl and More: All You Need to Know About Collecting Essential Music, from Cylinders and CDs To LPs And Tapes (Backbeat Books; September 25, 2018; $29.99) for an unrivaled overview of collectible music.
Thompson, the author of nearly 200 books on subjects ranging from music and film to erotica and philately, has made a career of scrutinizing what’s cool before it’s cool. His first vinyl study, Backbeat’s classic The Music Lover’s Guide to Record Collecting, was published in 2002, putting Thompson’s decades of audio interest and expertise to use back when PVC was MIA.
Today, The Ultimate Guide to Vinyl and More picks up where Thompson’s original left off. Enhanced with a new full color design, expanded timeline, and reams of information, the book offers an in-depth introduction to (and history of) music collecting. Neither price guide nor instruction manual, this text offers a clear, concise summary of the many items one can collect by exploring areas of interest (e.g. an artist’s career, a format’s development, a label’s history, etc.) and niches of note.
Dense, droll, and always illuminating, Thompson shepherds readers through over a century of recorded music, exploring every format in which audio has been released. Unlike other books that focus exclusively on vinyl, this 10×10 LP-lookalike caters to those whose obsession for music welcomes all vintage media. Landmark labels, collectible artists, specialist themes, and more are explored across a series of essays, while dozens of images bring the collector’s world to life.
Through it all, the joy and fascination of music collecting in all its guises comes alive. Indeed, Backbeat is so confident in the book as to reveal the one hard and fast rule of music collecting now: “If a record you own is going to go through the roof, it will only do so after you’ve sold it. Usually for a dollar.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | DAVE THOMPSON is the author of almost 200 books on music and pop culture, including I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto and Robert Plant: The Voice That Sailed the Zeppelin. A columnist with the record-collecting journal Goldmine, he is also editor of the magazine’s series of LP and 45 price guides.
