By Jonny Trunk. Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Foreword by Jon Savage.
Featuring over 550 graphically arresting record-shop bags, plus informative, humorous histories of the stores and their famous staff, this book reveals a previously undocumented side of British popular culture
This exhaustive collection of record-store bags provides a unique perspective on record shopping in the UK over the last century, bringing together over 500 incredible bags (some possibly the only surviving examples) to document the fascinating story of British high street record shopping. Bags from famous chains such as NEMS (where the Beatles were customers), Our Price and Virgin (the amazingly rare Roger Dean bags) sit alongside designs from independent stores run by eccentric enthusiasts. Packed with stories such as the first Jewish ska retailer, the record sellers who started Britain’s premier soccer league, famous staff (David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Morrissey) and equally infamous owners, these anecdotes of mythical vinyl entrepreneurs will entertain and delight. With vinyl record sales at their highest for decades (outselling CDs in the US), this publication acts as an amazing insight into the history, culture and visual language of record collecting. Following Own Label, Wrappers Delight and Auto Erotica, A–Z of Record Shop Bags is the next book in the series by Jonny Trunk and FUEL, examining overlooked aspects of our collective past. Jon Savage, author of the classic 1981 punk history England’s Dreaming, provides a foreword. Nostalgia enthusiast Jonny Trunk founded his record label Trunk Records in 1995, which specializes in releasing lost and archived recordings. He compiled and wrote The Music Library, documenting the hidden world of library music. His other books include Own Label, Wrappers Delight and Auto Erotica. Trunk also writes for a number of magazines and broadcasts every week on Resonance FM, London’s art broadcasting station.
Featured image is reproduced from 'A–Z of Record Shop Bags'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
GreyScape
Trunk has unwrapped the creativity of a forgotten industry. Often candy-striped pink or grey, these bags, that protected precious LP records, were often repurposed from sweet shops. Others are stamped with bubbly 70s fonts or punchy graphics. Each individually recalls a forgotten independent business and in turn the changing face of our shops and society.
It's Nice That
Elfie Thomas
Jonny Trunk’s extensive collection of record shop bags weaves together a less conventional history of British music, celebrating the shops where musicians and fans bought and sold their first LPs...His new book is a love letter to these forgotten spaces, accompanied by a juicy selection of anecdotes and little known facts about the record shops and their bags.
The Wire
Tessa Norton
A–Z Record Shop Bags doesn’t make any grand pseudo-theoretical claims about hauntology or lost culture but it doesn’t need to; it constructs its world entirely through practice. Consequently, as well as being a lot of fun, it is a much more useful document of pop culture than other works which take themselves more seriously.
Financial Times
Edwin Heathcote
Weirdly nostalgic, these seemingly throwaway things access Proustian memories (at least for certain generations) of Saturday mornings browsing in the record shop bins.
Rough Trade
One of Rough Trade's UK Books of the Year 2022.
in stock $37.95
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British record store bags, from the 1940s through the 1990s. 550 of them. That’s what you get—alongside smart, funny histories of the idiosyncratic stores and staff that produced them—in Jonny Trunk’s remarkable new 240-page compendium. “These mostly square-shaped slivers of paper and plastic are artifacts from a lost age: a music economy based on physical objects that could only be bought, in person, from physical outlets,” noted British music journalist Jon Savage writes. “In the first 30 or 40 years of British pop culture, the shop was the place: the agora, the arena where committed fans and casual buyers would meet and spend time, perhaps even talk to each other or hear something they might not previously have known. How many times have you bought something you first heard playing in a shop? These brightly colored objects are pure ephemera, designed only to carry the record inside from shop to home, from cash point to turntable. They were not meant to last, nor would they have done without Jonny Trunk’s prescient salvage. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, they comprise an alternative history of British pop—viewed from point of purchase rather than chart position. They embody a music industry that was still emerging from its subservience to light entertainment to become the prime generator of youth culture.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.75 x 7.25 in. / 240 pgs / 560 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $37.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $46.95 ISBN: 9781916218482 PUBLISHER: FUEL AVAILABLE: 4/19/2022 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by FUEL. By Jonny Trunk. Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Foreword by Jon Savage.
Featuring over 550 graphically arresting record-shop bags, plus informative, humorous histories of the stores and their famous staff, this book reveals a previously undocumented side of British popular culture
This exhaustive collection of record-store bags provides a unique perspective on record shopping in the UK over the last century, bringing together over 500 incredible bags (some possibly the only surviving examples) to document the fascinating story of British high street record shopping. Bags from famous chains such as NEMS (where the Beatles were customers), Our Price and Virgin (the amazingly rare Roger Dean bags) sit alongside designs from independent stores run by eccentric enthusiasts. Packed with stories such as the first Jewish ska retailer, the record sellers who started Britain’s premier soccer league, famous staff (David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Morrissey) and equally infamous owners, these anecdotes of mythical vinyl entrepreneurs will entertain and delight.
With vinyl record sales at their highest for decades (outselling CDs in the US), this publication acts as an amazing insight into the history, culture and visual language of record collecting. Following Own Label, Wrappers Delight and Auto Erotica, A–Z of Record Shop Bags is the next book in the series by Jonny Trunk and FUEL, examining overlooked aspects of our collective past. Jon Savage, author of the classic 1981 punk history England’s Dreaming, provides a foreword.
Nostalgia enthusiast Jonny Trunk founded his record label Trunk Records in 1995, which specializes in releasing lost and archived recordings. He compiled and wrote The Music Library, documenting the hidden world of library music. His other books include Own Label, Wrappers Delight and Auto Erotica. Trunk also writes for a number of magazines and broadcasts every week on Resonance FM, London’s art broadcasting station.
