The Vertigo Swirl Label: Worldwide Discography & Price Guide

A hand sized book rather than a coffee table filler. It's a really attractive book and printed on good quality paper.The layout is 2 pages per LP: full colour album cover, including front, back and fold outs printed on the left hand page and track, line up, release dates etc on the right hand page.Below each album cover the authors give a short write up of each record. This is where I can't really get to grips with why they chose to write a book about The Vertigo Swirl Label. With very few exceptions the write-ups are negative. A pat on the back for honesty but it just makes me wonder do they own copies of these generally expensive records? If so how much money have they spent building up a record collection that they don't seem to like very much? Don't let this put you off buying the book though because it really is a beautiful book to page through, which is possibly all that the authors do with the records if they do in fact own them.

Excellent bookHas helped me in tracking down over 20 titles and ensuring I am not getting ripped off by dealers

Excellent book well worth the money wish someone would would do the same with the ISLAND label

Arrived on time. Excellent product for anyone interested in vinyl

Excellent ,informative well written a must have

a very good book

Fantastic reference guide for any swirl collector

If you're a collector of the Vertigo Swirl label and need to know all the matrix numbers/different style labels/possible fakes etc etc then i imagine this would be a perfect reference manual/companion and for that purpose alone it would definitely warrant 5 stars.However, although i have many of these albums i only ever bought them for the actual music and didn't/don't specifically collect any label so for me i really bought the book to see all the album artwork and to a lesser degree read the reviews of the more obscure albums.Although an excellent book it does have quite a few minor niggles which resulted in me only giving it a 4 star review and feeling a bit guilty i felt i needed to perhaps explain my reasons for dropping one star.(1) I'd expected an A4 book (it's A5). As my main reason for buying the book was to see the artwork this was a bit of a disappointment. It's beautifully produced but obviously in a much smaller scale and not as visual as i'd hoped. On the same subject some of the albums are displayed in full (front/back/inside etc) but others (for no apparent reason?) only have a photo of the cover and although it's a small book there is still a lot of wasted space so that seems to be a missed opportunity. I'd have preferred to have paid more for a full size book with perhaps a paperback cover to reduce costs (this one is hardback).(2) The use of quotation marks really threw me at first. The opening one is shown underneath the word whereas the closing one is in it's usual place above the word. I initially thought this was a printing error but apparently it's how it's done in the German language! Although technically correct i still found it made reading the reviews somewhat confusing (for my English brain anyway!!)(3) The reviews made very interesting reading. The authors certainly were very frank with what they thought (generally a good thing of course) and i was enjoying them until i came to the review of Status Quo's 'Piledriver' album. Now i know they are a band hated by many but back in the early 70s this album was a 'must-have' by all my school-chums and 'Paper Plane' seemed to be on repeat at our local cafe, so to write it off as "mindless boogie-riffing" with no "originality or intention" is a bit harsh to say the least. Although music is obviously subjective when you read a review which you know is 'wrong' it then casts doubt when you read other reviews of albums you've not heard? Not wishing to seem to be on a mission but Status Quo's second album 'Hello' is the only album in the book that is not reviewed at all, they just talk about different sleeves in the review section. Perhaps they'd run out of negative comments?O.k, i know i've spent a lot of time moaning about very small points in the big scheme of things and yes, the book overall is excellent. Normally minor issues with this type of reference book wouldn't bother me or affect my marks but this time there were just too many things to ignore. Maybe my expectations were too high and it was bound to be a bit of a disappointment?