Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Music Book Review: 100 Best Selling Albums of the [50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s] by a variety of authors/editors

100 Best Selling Albums of the…[50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s]
by various editors (Music 780.166 One)

I was pleasantly surprised to discover this British series from the Polley Music Collection earlier this year. These are little gems of 20th Century American and English pop and rock music history. It was fun to re-visit information I knew about certain artists, songs, and albums in addition to learning new information. The set served as musical time capsules covering 4 1/2 of my six decades around the sun.

 

Organized by decade, each compact volume allots 2 pages per record album — Hey, kids, vinyl’s back! — one for a summary/critique and one for the album cover. You can digest the contents in small chunks or all at once. Appendices break the information down into categories like the highest ranking groups or solo artists overall, or which record companies had the most albums in the list. An index is also included in each volume as well as an introductory section.

 

Each volume has one or more designated editors, with Tom Broder (a versatile U.K. editor and writer) as overall Project Editor for the series. Being that these were published in 2004, the sales data may be quite outdated on some albums!

 

NOTE: There are many typographical errors in each of the volumes, some being of punctuation or grammar but others are misspellings of personal names and song titles. And, granted that the descriptions/reviews are very short, there seem to be some strange omissions such as not including Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty with the personnel list for Carlos Santana’s album Supernatural.

 

Recommended by Becky W.C.
Walt Branch Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations! 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!


Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

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