leonardcohenforum.com

tomsakic wrote:Well my guess is that's why they scheduled the book for May release - they waited for Old Ideas, and Leonard is hot sell now. And with the tour they did not know about, it would be even better sale.

True, think I will wait and see if Old Ideas is included before I buy it though.

I expect Live in London, Ten New Songs, Dear Heather and other releases as well, so I could live without Old Ideas. Many new albums to include. The original book ended with More Best Of, that's 1998 release. Although I wonder what will be the source of comments and annotations - as I said, the original book was more or less shortened and copy/pasted from Jim Devlin's biography of Leonard (published by same publisher so they had the rights to do so).

I've just downloaded the kindle version of this book from Amazon & can tell you that Old Ideas isn't included, Dear Heather being the last studio album that's mentioned. It does include all of the live albums up to Songs From The Road plus a brief mention of all of the compilations and the mainstream tribute albums.
I haven't had a chance to read much yet, it looks like there's a few shortish paragraphs for most tracks, some more detailed than others and generally shorter entries for more recent albums compared to the earlier ones.

My pre-ordered copy of this arrived from Amazon yesterday. I do wonder if TheWrongMan has the right edition as my book is bang up to date to include 4 pages on Old ideas - about the same length as the commentary on the other studio albums so far as I can see. The album is covered track by track and there are typically 2-3 paragraphs for each song. The author comments that it is too early to judge where Old Ideas fits in to the pantheon of Leonard's work but his preliminary conclusion is that most people will probably not see it as Leonard's greatest work but that it would be one of the albums to be considered when making that choice. I think I would probably go along with that.

There is also mention of the Complete Studio Albums and Complete Columbia Recordings box sets issued by Sony late last year with track listings as well as the recent live albums (Live in London, IOW & Songs From the Road).

There are black and white photos dotted through the book and 8 pages of (mainly) colour photos in timeline format at the centre of the volume which go up to the end of the 2008-10 world tour. None of the pictures are particularly unusual but the pages are nicely put together and the quality is good. All very easy on the eye.

By it's nature, this slim volume is a rather lightweight publication but the price is not unreasonable at £6.53. I'm happy enough to add it to my LC shelf.

Wendy

Oh, great. I am going to order it now if they're shipping it now. Thanks, Wendy.

Here's the book at the official publisher's page: http://www.musicroom.com/se/ID_No/01056618/details.html

So now we know "Maurice Ratcliff" is a pseudonym.

Hi Wendy,

Glad to hear that Old Ideas is included in the printed version, there must be a discrepancy between electronic and printed editions. I'll get on to Amazon and/or the publisher and see what they have to say.


Best
Phil

I got my copy from Amazon yesterday and started to read it last night. Quite interesting and as said above, it explains what each song means, but also leaves some of the songs for us to decide what they mean.
The CD's are explained in the order they were released, so I am only up to the fourth one. New Skin for old Ceremony. There are some nice pictures in it too.

That sounds promising/nice, maybe I shall order a copy for myself, as well.

Just ordered mine.