'You hold in your hand a miracle. A book about a passion, and the hipsters, oddballs and old heads who share it, written by one of their number, albeit a ludicrously erudite one’ - Danny Kelly A revival of interest in vinyl music has taken place in recent years – but for many of those from the ‘baby boomer’ generation, it never went away. Graham Sharpe’s vinyl love affair began in the 1960s and since then he has amassed over 3000 LPs and spent countless hours visiting record shops worldwide along with record fairs, car boot sales, online and real life auctions. Vinyl Countdown follows his journey to over a hundred shops across the globe - from New York to New Zealand, Walsall to Warsaw, Oslo to Ozstralia, (old) Jersey to New Jersey - and describes the many characters he has encountered and the adventures he accrued along the way. Vinyl Countdown seeks to reawaken the often dormant desire which first promoted the gathering of records, and to confirm the belief of those who still indulge in it, that they happily belong to, and should celebrate the undervalued, misunderstood significant group of music-obsessed vinylholics, who always want – need – to buy… just one more record. A mesmerising blend of memoir, travel, music and social history, Vinyl Countdown will appeal to anyone who vividly recalls the first LP they bought and any music fan who derives pleasure from the capacity that records have for transporting you back in time.

Vinyl Countdown

Arts & Photography

Sharpe, Graham

Music

Oldcastle Books

Faced with a sudden and unexpected diagnosis of prostate cancer, Graham Sharpe set about trying to catalogue what he went through en route to acquiring the condition and how he dealt with the grinding process of his treatment, despite having no idea of the ultimate outcome. Along the way he met and befriended many others undergoing the physical and mental stresses of treatment, emotional turmoil comparable with watching their favourite football team lose every game they play. In this intimate memoir charting his own personal experience of coming to terms with prostate cancer, Graham brings humour and a light touch to a serious subject.

PROSTrATE CANCER: The Misunderstood Male Killer

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Far from being yesterday's fading, forgotten format, vinyl records have survived and flourished as the music medium of choice for not only baby-boomers, but all ages. Every record a collector acquires comes with a story of its own, and the recent Covid-19 lockdowns prompted many vinylholics, including Sharpe, to look more closely at their reasons for collecting, take stock of existing collections and rediscover old favourites. ON THE RECORDs: Notes from the Vinyl Revival includes interviews and contributions from voices across the record industry - shop owners, record company insiders, online/postal sellers, auction organisers, market traders of vinyl, amateur collectors - who share their stories with candour, warmth and humour. A mesmerising blend of memoir, travel, music and social history that will appeal to anyone who vividly recalls the first LP they bought and any music fan who derives pleasure from the capacity that records have for transporting you back in time.

ON THE RECORDs: Notes from the Vinyl Revival

William Hill's Racing Dates

Sports & Outdoors

Individual Sports

Virgin Books

The Racing Post Horseracing On This Day

Racing Post Books

Edited by one of the Racing Post's long-standing subeditors, the ever-popular Racing Post Guide to the Jumps is one of the key tools for every racing enthusiast and punter to look ahead to the upcoming National Hunt season. It includes exclusive interviews with the top jumps trainers, both in the UK and Ireland, in which they discuss their teams and plans for their most exciting horses. It profiles 250 horses who are likely to be key players throughout the season and should be worth following. Plus it also unearths some likely unexposed 'dark horses' to follow that may be less well known. It also contains both Topspeed and Racing Post ratings. In full colour throughout, it is the one book that every jumps racing enthusiast should have.

Racing Post Guide to the Jumps 2022-23

A Gentleman's Guide to Calculating Winning Bets

Humor & Entertainment

Puzzles & Games

High Stakes Publishing

It was, said "The Times", the equivalent of a racing driver winning every Grand Prix, or a golfer scoring straight birdies in the final round of the Open to finish with a hole in one. No-one would have believed it could happen but, on Saturday 28 September 1996, at Ascot racecourse, the impossible did. Frankie Dettori won every single race on the card: a Magnificent Seven. Now, to mark the fifth anniversary of that extraordinary day, Graham Sharpe tells the full story of how history was made. For, this is a tale of losing as well as winning - on a comparably epic scale. Dettori's seven wins cost Britain's bookmakers 40 million pounds. For them it was more like the Wall Street Crash. Sharpe should know: his firm. William Hill, presented one lucky punter alone with a cheque for more than half a million pounds. "The Magnificent Seven", therefore, follows, that day from its innocuous beginnings, hour by hour, race by race, through to its unbelievable climax when Fujiyama Crest just held on by a head to win the 5.30 at 2-1. There is the amateur footballer in Lancashire who, to his wife's disapproval, put 69 pounds on Frankie to win every race - and the cleaner from Lincolnshire who passed up the vital extra 50p for an accumulator bet as just too extravagant. There is the on-course bookie who at the last minute escaped ruin by going to Worcester rather than Ascot, another who chose Ascot and finished up having to sell his house, and the inside story of how, as events unfolded, the big betting chains took desperate precautions to avoid the same fate themselves. There are recollections by all racing's major figures, from television's Peter O'Sullevan, John Francome and Clare Balding to pundits and personalities like John McCririck and Barry 'the Bismarck' Dennis. And above all there is the charismatic figure of Frankie Dettori himself, 'the first rock 'n' roll jockey', who the night before had confessed to his fiancee 'a bad feeling about Saturday' - and ended the next day a superstar. A story of prodigious sporting achievement, an equally prodigious betting heist, and a day that changed many people's lives for ever, "The Magnificent Seven" is an enthralling and unique sports book.

The Magnificent Seven: Seven Winners in a Day: How Frankie Dettori Achieved the Impossible

Aurum Press

The Magnificent Seven

Everyone has heard of Screaming Lord Sutch. In the sixties he was one of the fathers of British rock and roll, with a wild pyrotechnic stage act years ahead of people like Alice Cooper. By the eighties he was regularly upstaging prime ministers at general elections in his Monster Raving Loony Party garb of leopardskin coat and top hat. And always he was the Great British Eccentric available for chat shows and publicity stunts. Most recently, his trademark number, 'Jack the Ripper', has been covered by the hippest band of all, the White Stripes. But in 1999 Sutch died by his own hand, approaching sixty lonely and depressed, still grinding the motorways to crummy gigs, his private life in confusion. Graham Sharpe knew him for nearly thirty years, and this first biography is an affecting, sometimes shocking portrait of an enigmatic Zelig-figure who cropped up in everyone's life and eventually found his own stalled in an endless Groundhog Day of superficiality.

The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch by Sharpe, Graham (2005) Hardcover

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