CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/29/2022

Jonny Trunk’s ‘A–Z of Record Shop Bags’ is new from FUEL!

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.”