Jennifer McKnight-Trontz - This Ain’t No Disco (Thames & Hudson)

Perfect coffee-table browsing, this 255-page encyclopaedia of sleeves from the post-punk era harks back to those classic The Album Cover Album books from that very period. If you’ve been reading Simon Reynold’s much talked about biog of the era, Rip It Up And Start Again lately then this is the perfect accompaniment, depicting the sleeves of most all of the records he examines.

It does have a slight US-bent, though but that’s not my only criticisms. My main gripe is the captions that accompany some of the sleeves. Firstly, only a small minority get captioned. If you’re going to tell a story why not tell it? Why the fragments? Also, the captions that are there offer little narrative, only recycling facts you’d probably already know.

So in a book celebrating the last great, golden era of the record sleeve, you don’t come away knowing anything about the people that made it happen –Peter Saville, XL, Accident, Keith Breeden, Town & Country Planning and the like all remain queuing up for good books to be written about them.

But you do come away with an instant coffee-table conversation piece. And an unputdownlable trip down memory lane.