I'm actually the type of reader that most publishers (and to a lesser extent, authors, I suppose) absolutely hate because I'm not an immediate buyer, I'm willing to shop around and I'm willing to wait years (usually, not always) to read/buy a book at a decent price.
Since the advent of the Kindle, I generally look for books to go on sales as Amazon likes to yo-yo prices up and down and once I locate a book of interest, I'll check it out often to see if prices have dipped.
There are many books like this, but one of note was the Jan and Dean record by Mark Moore.
The book looked interesting, but the price for the printed book was through the roof and even the Kindle version was usually around thirty dollars, which for an E-Book is not just stiff, it's concrete!
However, around New Years Day, a bunch of books that usually were priced higher than I was ever going to pay showed up at around five bucks per (must have been lucky because I've never seen them anywhere near that low before or since) and I grabbed them.
One was Paul Reeth's book on the USFL (Maybe I'll write about that soon as well), another was Marvin Kalb's look back at 1956 in Russia (I'm in the middle of that book right now) and there was the Jan and Dean Record.
I've been a Jan and Dean fan since I was a child as I've written before and there were loads of facts in this book that I never knew and items that I never have never seen even online as I tried to fact check, so it is about as comprehensive as you are going to find.
In fact, the detail is so impressive and minute that you can easily get swallowed up by the sheer mass of the material.
Facts ranging from Jan Berry fathering a child as a high school senior and having his parents raise the child as his sibling to The Who's Keith Moon being such a massive fan of the duo that he pushed to have the Who cover many songs of theirs ( he was successful just once) to details of Jan's life after his 1966 accident and the up and down relationship of the two along with details down to the amount of money paid to about everyone that you could think of down to paying the college bookstore, it's just more than I can type.
I thought I knew a lot, but after reading this book, I learned so much more and not just about Jan and Dean either.
The reader learns just how dirty that record business really was in those oft-romanticized times (I imagine that it hasn't changed often over the years), just how hard the talent worked for not always the glamorous pay and those famous West Coast studio musicians of the time.
Mark Moore talked to anyone remotely involved with Jan and Dean and I am staggered just by the number of people that he had to have spoken to alone, let alone the research.
It's a niche' book and unless you are an uber fan, the price alone will deter you whether in physical copy or e-book.
However, considering the amount of time and research involved, I can almost recommend the price (if you are rich, just buy the darn thing) and I never thought I'd remotely consider saying that about a 75 dollar book!
Kudos to Mark Moore for putting together the type of reference book that you don't expect to see about a music group and if you see it reasonable, grab it even if you are barely familiar with Jan and Dean, the story itself will grab you and suck you in...
Back later with more as I have another feature on my mind that I want to bang out as well as this one, which I've started three previous times and found myself interrupted by other posts along with a falling tree!!!
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