Having pretty much completed our journey around the world in 80 lathes (or perhaps a bit more than 80, but anyway), today we will be visiting The Netherlands, not to take apart their vintage Sondisko lathes, (discussed in Issue 168), but to close this series with a look at an excellent publication, of interest to all who dig the groove!
The publication idea began as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Record Industry, a record pressing plant in Haarlem, a city 10 miles west of Amsterdam (not to be confused with Harlem, the Upper Manhattan neighborhood in New York City). Aptly titled Passion For Vinyl, the first edition of the first part of the book was published in 2013, soon to be followed by a second edition in 2014 and an additional book, Passion for Vinyl, Part II, in 2018 (shown in the header image above), in celebration of 20 years of the record industry.
The original book was subtitled “A Tribute To All Who Dig The Groove” and Part II simply “An Ode To Analog.” Both were written by Robert Haagema, a Dutch journalist, author, collector and audiophile (as per his own description in his biography within the book). Anouk Rijnders, CCO for Record Industry, and Artone Studio, acted as executive producers.
The first book was designed by Rik van der Eng and features the astonishingly excellent photography of Miodrag Misha Pipercic. Part II retains the overall original design of Rik Van der Hing, while adding design and illustrations by Tessel Dekker of Segolia Design, and the photography of Tim Knol.
The first Passion for Vinyl book.
These hardcover books come in a square format, roughly nine inches, and contain a 7-inch record on the cover. The first book has a black record featuring Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell on one side and Rinus’ Garage feat. Triggerfinger on the other. Part II comes with a white record (pressed from white vinyl), with Hasil Adkins and Bloodshot Bill on one side and Ellen Allien on the other.
The books contain the stories of a diverse range of people, all connected by one consistent thread: a passion for vinyl. In addition, the first book includes a foreword by Michael Fremer, back then still affiliated with Stereophile and Analog Planet (currently writing for The Absolute Sound and Tracking Angle), followed by a detailed overview titled “How Records Are Made.” It continues with the captivating accounts of the people featured, too numerous to list here in full, but the ones that immediately stood out for me as people I know through my business include Craig Kallman of Atlantic Records, Lewis Durham of Kitty, Daisy and Lewis (whose father used to run The Exchange, a world-class mastering facility in London with multiple disk mastering lathes, from where Lewis appears to have acquired a passion for vintage analog recording equipment and disk recording lathes in particular), Bernie Grundman (an internationally-renowned mastering engineer using modified Scully lathes), Rinus Hooning (a mastering engineer currently working at Artone Studio), Sean Davies (a retired British audio engineer who had once been responsible for maintaining most, if not all, disk mastering lathes in use in the UK), Ton Vermeulen (the owner of Record Industry), Henry Rollins (of Black Flag and the Henry Rollins Band) and many more. It concludes with a section dedicated to the “Past, Present and Future of The Record Industry.”
Pages in the “How Records Are Made” section of Passion for Vinyl.
Part II begins with a foreword by Michael Kurtz, co-founder of Record Store Day, continuing on with the same format, presenting a range of “passions” for vinyl records. In this tome as well, I immediately found people I knew from my work, including Pete Hutchison of The Electric Recording Company (the audiophile record label, discussed in Issue 179), T-Bone Burnett (whose Ionic Originals debut record, a one-off Bob Dylan recording, fetched $1.77 million, as discussed in the previous episode in Issue 179), Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and Fugazi, owner of Dischord Records), Lucy Launder (head of Mastering at Abbey Road Studios), Miles Showell (independent mastering engineer at Abbey Road Studios), John Grado (of Grado Labs, manufacturer of phono cartridges and headphones), Mandy Parnell (one of the very few female mastering engineers involved with cutting records and owner of Black Saloon Studios in London), Eric Astor (owner of Furnace Record Pressing), and Flo Kaufmann (one of the very few people involved with keeping Neumann lathes maintained and repaired, primarily active in the German and French-speaking world, whose work was discussed in Issue 166).
This book ends with a labyrinth-like illustration of “Vinyl through the Years,” presumably the work of Tessel Dekker. It begins in 1931 and right after 2017, it states, “YOU ARE HERE, keep on spinning.”
Pages from the “Vinyl Through the Years” illustration.
The printing and overall typographic quality is outstanding, from the hard cover to the paper quality, trimming and binding. It is a real pleasure to hold such a quality publication in your hands, leaf through it, and realize that, despite the many signs to the contrary these days, it is the passion of a few people, not only for vinyl but embodied in a book that has highlighted such traditional arts as pressing, plating and cutting records, printing record sleeves and books, typography, photography, and several other arts that could have easily become extinct if it wasn’t for the love and passion of those who keep them alive, through the decades and even centuries, occasionally still resulting in such masterpieces as books such as Passion for Vinyl and Passion for Vinyl, Part II being created. They’re highly recommended reading, and can be proudly displayed in your bookshelf or coffee table.
The books can be obtained through the Passion for Vinyl website, https://www.passionforvinyl.com.
I have been told by Anouk Rijnders, that a Part III may happen at some point as well! I will be eagerly awaiting.
Header image: Passion for Vinyl, Part II. All images courtesy of Passion for Vinyl.
