From the collection of Steve Goldman comes a new book, The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve, containing the best of the worst as it were!

In essence this book revolves around Steve's remarkable archive of album covers which first surfaced at a public exhibition in Huddersfield in 2021 where it quickly picked up coverage from all the major media and local news channels, giving people a much needed smile following the pandemic. The display moved to Stoke On Trent where Easy On The Eye Books met up with Steve and discussed the idea of a book. After an hour, much of it spent doubled up with laughter viewing the display, it was clear that Steve had tapped into something special.

There are any number of "worst record sleeve" galleries on the web, usually recycling the same poor quality jpegs, and even a couple of very low budget books. But Easy On The Eye decided that while these covers are strange for any number of reasons, just to label them as "worst" seemed pejorative, there had to be a story behind them.

Hence The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve, which aims to tackle the subject properly, with input not just from Steve, but some of the artists, collectors and designers, to find out what really happened. Simon Robinson at Easy On The Eye, who has produced many sleeve designs himself (happily none of which feature in Steve's collection!) and researched the subject for many years, has written the text.

Photographs by: Stephen Goldman