Hi Bob, I wonder what some of your essential pre-internet reference works were. Back before Google, what books or resources did you keep around and refer to regularly as you wrote the Consumer Guide or long-form pieces—whether for genre history, artist catalog, music theory/terminology, chart information, or anything else? — Jay Thompson, Seattle
Joel Whitburn’s guides to the
Billboard charts have always been valuable. I still keep them on my desk’s bookshelf, although I see that the unbound, stapled, pamphlet-style first edition without which I couldn’t have written the ‘70s CG book that made me slightly famous, is missing its first and final pages, so tattered it now starts with Avalon and ends with Welch. The Whitburn I still use is
The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. I also keep
The Trouser Press Record Guide close at hand.
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