Product Description

This collection of covers from official UK football programmes, now available in a pocket edition, symbolizes the golden age of British football. Taken from every league club, from post-war to the start of the Premiership (1992), the book features over 100 teams and 450 colour reproductions. It also includes a broad selection of non-league clubs, and other significant programmes such as the 1966 World Cup Final. Compiled by Bob Stanley (of the band St Etienne) and Paul Kelly, a Roy of the Rovers spirit is portrayed in these cover designs. Colourful graphics and charming illustrations reflect an age of innocence far from the glossy photographic corporate quality they have today. Bob Stanley contributes an introduction that describes his fascination with the humble football programme, his favourite designs, and how the dawn of desktop publishing drew to a close one of the most interesting and previously unrecorded areas of vernacular design, while the distinguished football journalist Brian Glanville has written a foreword tracing the origins of the club programme. This book is sure to appeal to graphic designers and everyone interested in design as well as anyone with an interest in football.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #516462 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

One for the football programme fanatic only
I'm one of those old bores that get on everybodies nerves moaning that football was better in the sixties & seventies than it is today. I'm forever reminiscing about the days when every team had a player called Bobby in it and come mid-winter every game was played in three inches of mud.

Even I though, can't see the point in this book.

Basically the book is just a series of reproductions of the covers of football programmes published in the post war years to 1992.

Whilst I spent a pleasantly nostalgic half hour or so reading through it, thats all I got from the book. Surely the pleasure that the average football lover gets from looking through old programmes (which I admit to doing often) is not the cover, but the contents. The cover on its own doesn't tell you that much about match, you need to read the articles actually in the programme to get a feel of the time when the match was played.

There are an few reasonably interesting articles as well as the programme covers but not enough to persuade me that this book is for the football programme fanatic only.