Elvis Costello A Life In Liner Notes

[johnfoyle]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/elvis-costello,1464/


Elvis Costello A Life In Liner Notes

By Noel Murray

On April 26, Rhino released a two-disc edition of Elvis Costello's 1986 album King Of America, completing a reissue project that's taken five years and encompassed 16 double-disc sets. Best of all for Costello fans, the King Of America reissue includes the last of Costello's personally written liner notes, which, across 16 booklets, at a minimum of 12 pages each, has been the equivalent of a 100-page autobiography. Costello has been remarkably forthright throughout, detailing his varying addictions and obsessions, and in the Get Happy!! notes, he even dissects the infamous, nearly career-derailing moment when he was goaded into calling Ray Charles "a blind, ignorant nigger." Here are some of the highlights of the Costello story, album by album, and in his own words.
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My Aim Is True (1977)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "In 1976 I was operating an I.B.M. 360 computer in an office next to a lipstick factory. My duties included printing out invoices for the moustache waxes of the occasional Duchess who visited the company's West End salon."



Choice Cut: "I spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee and the first Clash album. By the time I got down to the last few grains, I had written 'Watching The Detectives.'"

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "I continued with my computer job after my first single came and went without troubling the charts. My record advance consisted of 150 pounds, a new cassette tape recorder, and a Vox battery-powered practise amp. I took some of my newfound wealth and bought back a copy of A Hard Day's Night that I had recently been forced to sell to pay the gas bill. About three weeks later I was on the cover of a music paper—an overnight success after seven years."


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This Year's Model (1978)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "The engineer was Roger Bechirian, who was to work on our next four Nick Lowe-produced albums. It was Roger who had the task of making a sonic reality out of Nick's directions, such as 'turn the drums into one big maraca' or 'make it sound like a dinosaur eating cars.'"

Choice Cut: "One night, while suffering from what might be politely called 'assisted insomnia,' I scrawled a large number of verses about this headlong pursuit of oblivion. Five days later, we recorded 'Pump It Up' in one take."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "For a brief, improbable moment the horrified children of Britain were offered magazines featuring pop pinups of myself... right alongside Debbie Harry and those other blonde beauties, The Police. Thankfully for all concerned, I was just about to screw it up completely."


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Armed Forces (1979)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "I'd got used to staggering, half asleep, into a truck-stop in the middle of the night to squander scarce drinking money on irresistible junk... 3-D Jesus postcards, and cut-out Conway and Loretta cassettes that played once and then unraveled. Every shop front or nightclub sign seemed like a line from a song. In some cases that was just what they became."

Choice Cut: "'Chemistry Class' was a reaction to the complacence of some of the university campuses that we visited on those first trips to America. At times we seemed to only encounter hedonism or braying superficiality."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "Personal and global matters are spoken about with the same vocabulary; maybe this was a mistake. Betrayal and murder are not the same thing. I was not quite 24 and I thought I knew it all."


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Get Happy!! (1980)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "The success of the Armed Forces album threatened to take us to a place where there was little understanding or tolerance for detail, only a mass reaction to a hit tune. The game I was playing in my mind (or perhaps with my mind) was about to come to a very nasty conclusion. A ridiculous drunken argument would culminate in me speaking the exact opposite of my true beliefs. Our records were pulled from the few radio playlists where they were featured, our shows picketed by the very anti-racist organisation for which we had appeared six months earlier, and there were over a hundred death threats to my person. With hindsight, it might be tempting to claim that I had some noble motive in basing this record on the music that I had admired and learned from prior to my brush with infamy. But... I simply went back to work and relied on instinct, curiosity, and enduring passions."

Choice Cut: "Bearing in mind that this record was made many years before the trend towards 'sampling,' we made a pretty good job of lifting the main figure of Booker T. & The MGs' 'Time Is Tight' for 'Temptation.'"

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "I was standing backstage at a gala show in Los Angeles with a group of friends in the dingy, concrete loading bay when I saw a man in dark sunglasses being led in our direction. It was Ray Charles. All I could do was turn my head away with shame and frustration knowing that this was a hand I will probably never shake."


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Trust (1981)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "From a very personal point of view, this was easily the most drug-influenced record of my career. It was completed close to a self-induced nervous collapse on a diet of rough 'scrumpy' cider, gin and tonic, various powders, only one of which was 'Andrew's Liver Salts,' and, in the final hours, Johnnie Walker Black Label."

Choice Cut: "Although I might have risked a rebellion among The Attractions to state so openly, I privately modeled 'White Knuckles' on a couple of XTC records."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "Almost by accident, the album arrived at a sound and tone that was very true to my feelings at the time. The world it described was the opposite of the album title in much the same way that Get Happy!! had been less than cheerful. It suggested a tarnished and disappointed soul looking beyond the certainties of brash, arrogant youth and early success and on into a life (and possibly a career) in music."


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Almost Blue (1981)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "Much had happened to me... from scandal to disgrace, near-divorce, and the end of something like pop-stardom. Now I had developed the notion that I might better express my feelings through other people's words and music. Country ballads suited my blue mood most of all."

Choice Cut: "Booze was certainly in my blood and on my mind, and this led to us cutting both Merle Haggard's 'Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down' and Charlie Rich's 'Sittin' And Thinkin',' which begins 'I got loaded last night on a bottle of gin,' my drink of choice at the time."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "We were playing the rather soulless Opryland Theater, part of the themepark complex at the edge of [Nashville]. I recall coming away with the gift of a pair of complimentary Opryland cuff links with a mandolin design. That was about the best it got in America."


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Imperial Bedroom (1982)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "To some extent Imperial Bedroom was the record on which The Attractions and I granted ourselves the sort of scope that we imagined The Beatles had enjoyed in the mid-'60s. If we needed a harpsichord or Mellotron, we hired one; if we required a 12-string acoustic guitar, marimba, or accordion, we went out and bought one; if we heard strings and trumpet and horns, we booked the musicians and Steve [Nieve] began writing out the parts."

Choice Cut: "Many of the songs take their cue from the opening track, 'Beyond Belief.' They exhibit a malaise of the spirit and a sinking feeling about happy endings. The souring and spoiling of England was just under way. I intend that most 'private' matters should remain that way, but when the opening track is called 'Beyond Belief,' and the key song of a record is entitled 'Man Out Of Time,' you don't have to be a detective or a psychiatrist to work out what was going on."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "The album was not a big commercial success, despite Columbia Records' absurd 'Masterpiece?' ad campaign—which was really asking for it."


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Punch The Clock (1983)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "Between 1979 and 1983 something strange happened. The British government mutated from an annoying and often disreputable body that spent people's taxes on the wrong things into a hostile regime contemptuous of anyone who did not serve or would not yield to its purpose."

Choice Cut: "['Pills And Soap'] seemed to alarm the BBC, who feared that the lyrics might somehow contravene the rules of broadcasting 'balance' during the election campaign."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "Punch The Clock was our chance to get reacquainted with the wonderful world of pop music and still maintain a sense of humour. After Nashville and the labyrinth of Imperial Bedroom, I was ready to find a different production approach. I haven't always been kind about this album. I find it hard to ignore the benefit of hindsight."


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Goodbye Cruel World (1984)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "I almost completely thwarted the efforts of my producers, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, and it is true to say that they were probably ill-equipped for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time. A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been more appropriate."

Choice Cut: "['The Only Flame In Town'] was one of two tracks that were given the concentrated production approach, and like many cuts on the record, makes excessive use of the new DX7 synthesizer, the tone of which might as well date-stamp the album to an exact week in 1984. It is not a sound that has improved with age."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "It is probably the worst record that I could have made of a decent bunch of songs."


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King Of America (1986)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "During my visits to Hollywood, I found myself sitting around hotel rooms late at night with other songwriters, drinking and swapping stories and songs. This was entirely new to someone who had started out in the rather more insular and competitive London scene. I would meet a lot of musicians and other interesting characters in [T-Bone Burnett's] company over the next few years, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Dixon, Harry Dean Stanton, Kris Kristofferson, and Lucinda Williams."

Choice Cut: "[On] the fade of 'I'll Wear It Proudly'... Mitchell [Froom] plays the organ melody that I had sung to him. He would make good use of it, turning a variation of that theme into a hook on his production of the big Crowded House hit, 'Don't Dream It's Over.'"

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "I had found myself in the darker implications of adulthood and still being billed as some kind of 'vengeful geek' just didn't make it anymore. It was the exact opposite of an 'identity crisis.' I now decided to re-claim my family name... King Of America might have been credited to 'Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus,' but anxious management and the record company people prevailed."

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Blood & Chocolate (1986)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "This is a record of people beating and twanging things with a fair amount of yelling. Although it's commonly thought that high volume in the studio creates an uncontrollable sonic picture, this approach seemed to suit the material entirely."



Choice Cut: "The events of 'Tokyo Storm Warning' travel from Narita to Heysel via Pompeii, Port Stanley, Paris, and London. Tokyo is just the place where these things begin and end. It is a city for which I am never prepared. Each arrival is shocking and slightly alienating... it is only when you are about to leave that the rhythm of the place starts to make sense and you wish you had more time."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "The album was a pissed-off 32-year-old divorcé's version of the musical blueprint with which I had begun my recording career with The Attractions. My relationship with the band had now soured almost beyond repair."


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Spike (1989)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "Having just signed to Warner Bros. for the entire world, I was working with the budget of a small independent movie. I had the blueprint of five albums in my head. They told me to make whatever record I wanted. I seem to have elected to make all five albums at once."

Choice Cut: "'Veronica' was one of the very first songs [Paul McCartney and I] worked on. It is a wishful song about my grandmother's failing hold on memory and reality. As the subject was so personal, I didn't find it so easy to edit the song. Paul put some shape into the music of a rambling bridge and tightened up a few of the lyrical lines in the verses."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "['Veronica'] went into the U.S. Top 20. If it had not done so, then this album might have been counted amongst the most obscure in my catalogue. Instead of which, during its original release, it became the best-selling album of my career to date. When I listen to it now, this seems pretty curious—not because the songs are bad, but because they are rather off, each track being very different from the next. I'm not so sure anyone would bankroll a record of this kind these days. So I am rather glad that we made Spike while I had the chance."


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Mighty Like A Rose (1991)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "CNN was trailing every bulletin with their new 'Desert Storm' logo and musical fanfare. I did not imagine that I would be recording any of this record during wartime when I wrote it, although I was looking at the world without much affection. Many of my early records have been described as being 'angry,' a quality that I think is exaggerated by a quirk of my vocal delivery. However, if you really want to hear an angry record, then this disc is for you."

Choice Cut: "This album opens with 'The Other Side of Summer.' The arrangement is a pastiche of The Beach Boys after the fashion of The Beatles' 'Back In The U.S.S.R.' The words are a catalogue of pop conceits, deceits, hypocrisies, and delusions. I include myself in this parade of liars and dupes."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "This record says the world we are making is grim, and I believe that it is. We are cruel to each other, we lie and manipulate until the unworthy encounter a love to which we must surrender."


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Brutal Youth (1994)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "Although Pete Thomas and I had continued to work together since the apparent demise of The Attractions, my relationship with Steve Nieve and Bruce Thomas was pretty nonexistent. After my attempt to reassemble the band for the recording of Mighty Like A Rose had ended in an unseemly legal squabble, I assumed that we had cut our last record together."

Choice Cut: "'This Is Hell' was an attempt to continue the fantasy afterlife theme of 'God's Comic' from Spike. I hope the song justifies its existence with the notion that 'in hell' you can hear Richard Rogers' 'My Favourite Things,' but it is always performed by Julie Andrews and never by John Coltrane."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "The album was tagged with that lame old cliché: 'back to basics.' These simplifications may have made for good ad copy and lazy journalism, but they were pretty inaccurate. In time I came to regard the Brutal Youth sessions as a failure, simply because the little that was said about the album tended to focus on superficial appearances and the soap-opera mechanics of the recording, while totally ignoring the content."


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Kojak Variety (1995)



Preparation/Production/Perspective: "The simple idea of going to a Caribbean island to record 'some of my favourite songs with some of my favourite musicians'—as the original sleeve note defined this record—seemed like an inviting prospect. Our afternoon breaks saw a table laden with green mangoes and flying fish. The evening began with rum and grapefruit cocktails. Wild monkeys had been briefly glimpsed in a field beside the studio."


Choice Cut: "I first heard Little Richard's 'Bama Lama Bama Loo' in 1964. I have the record in front of me now. It's an 'A' label [advance] copy, which means I got it from my father [a big-band singer]. It also certainly means I am actually the second member of the McManus family to perform 'Bama Lama Bama Loo.'"

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "I really wanted Warner Bros. to issue the record without any fanfare, letting it simply appear in the racks. It was the kind of 'lost record' that I dreamed of discovering, by one of my favourite bands, while idly flipping through racks of vinyl during the thousands of hours that I had spent in record shops."


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All This Useless Beauty (1996)

Preparation/Production/Perspective: "This record exists in the distance between an ideal and the reality. I've read that it is simply a collection of songs that I wrote for other singers—usually with the implication that this was a bad or inferior thing."

Choice Cut: "The bleaker implication of ['I Want To Vanish'] was not something I'd expect anyone else to relish. The line 'I'm as certain as a lost dog pondering a signpost' pretty much states my frame of mind at the time of this recording."

Reflections/Reactions/Reprisals: "The fan or admirer in many of us may imagine a different creative history for our favourite singers, actors, and artists. What if Elvis Presley had lived to record 'Brilliant Disguise' by Bruce Springsteen or Picasso had painted the Forth Bridge or Winona Ryder had taken the part of the daughter in The Godfather III? Or perhaps all these things are better the way they are. In the end it doesn't really matter that Johnny Cash never recorded 'Complicated Shadows' or that Sam Moore couldn't see himself singing 'Why Can't A Man Stand Alone.' It was enough to be thinking of them."

[wardo68]

That's hysterical. What are the chances the writer lifted everything from this forum?

[anjabro]

Choice Cut: "[On] the fade of 'I'll Wear It Proudly'... Mitchell [Froom] plays the organ melody that I had sung to him. He would make good use of it, turning a variation of that theme into a hook on his production of the big Crowded House hit, 'Don't Dream It's Over.'"

Wow....amazing....I never spotted that before, but it's completely true...

Of course I knew about the MF link before, but i never listened to Crowded house looking for EC links...I think I will be now...

[johnfoyle]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/book ... lets_.html


CD booklets from My Aim, Imperial Bedroom, and Useless Beauty

Photo illustration by Jane Zitomer.


Everyday I Hide the Book
Elvis Costello’s rock-star memoir is one of the best ever. It was written for 17 CD booklets, and it might never see the light of day again.

By John Lingan

Friday, Aug. 3, 2012

Thirty-five years ago, a gangly 22-year-old named Declan MacManus quit his job in a London lipstick factory and adopted the stage name Elvis Costello. Stiff Records was about to release his debut LP, My Aim Is True, and had signed him to a contract that could support his wife and young son. With the windfall, Costello bought back the copy of A Hard Day's Night that he’d pawned to afford the previous month’s gas bill.

Costello has never been overly forthcoming about his personal life, so it might be surprising to hear that he divulged this humanizing anecdote, and many others, in one of the best rock-star memoirs of the last decade. His story is more music-oriented than Patti Smith’s Just Kids, less self-aggrandizing than Keith Richards’ Life, and more revealing than Chronicles Pt. 1 by Bob Dylan. Unlike those books, Costello's memoir hasn't won any awards or appeared on any best-seller lists—fact is, it doesn't even have a title or a publisher. But between 2001 and 2006, Costello authored 17 long reflective essays to accompany Rhino Records’ full reissue of his 1977-1996 catalog. These reminiscences add up to more than 60,000 words—longer than The Great Gatsby—and they provide the only intimate firsthand look at one of the most written-about pop careers of all time.

But good luck finding them. After the Rhino reissue series, Universal Music bought the rights to Costello’s first decade of recordings and reissued them yet again, essay-free, under their Hip-O Select label. Rhino has since stopped releasing even the other ‘80s and ‘90s records that included Costello’s writings; if you want to own them now, you’ll have to find used copies or pay anywhere from $30 to $80 for new ones on Amazon. (Alternatively, you can read typo-riddled transcriptions of some of the essays on the Elvis Costello wiki.)

You’d think that Costello, who according to his management now owns the rights to the essays, would be keen to publish them for a broader audience. (He denied Slate's request to run an excerpt to accompany this article.) After all, musician memoirs have become big business since he wrote his. Books by Eric Clapton, Gil Scott-Heron, Jay-Z, and Bob Mould have been covered as cultural events, just as Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace promises to be when it arrives this fall. And certainly Costello’s career choices have been inscrutable enough to warrant explanation. The memoir-in-CD-booklets engagingly chronicles Costello’s evolution from cantankerous young man to irrepressible middle-aged gadfly and collaborator. Now in his 50s, Costello is an improbable ambassador for big band jazz, New Orleans funk, American roots, and Gershwin-indebted orchestral music, to name only a few of the styles he’s indulged over the last decade. But the liner notes remind the reader that Costello’s tastes and ambitions extended beyond rock from the beginning. Remembering the songwriting process for My Aim Is True, he recalls the mix of influences he stirred into one of his best songs:

I spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee and the first Clash album, listening to it over and over. By the time I got down to the last few grains, I had written “Watching the Detectives.” The chorus had these darting figures that I wanted to sound like something from a Bernard Herrmann score.

Costello pays heed to the required arc of the rock star memoir, though the limited space available to him prevents wallowing in backstage excesses. “I surrendered to temptation, committed selfish acts of betrayal, and destroyed any possibility of trust and reconciliation in my marriage,” he admits of his heavy-touring days following 1979’s Armed Forces. “I was as normal as any young idiot suddenly thrust into the charts and onto the cover of periodicals while being spoken about with exaggerated awe.” But he avoids self-pity, writing, “If I seemed a little self-absorbed at the time, then I have to say that much duller songs have been written on the subject.”

Amid all the pill-popping and excessive drinking, Costello found solace in relatively “duller” styles than his own vengeful proto-New Wave. In 1980, he released Get Happy!!, 20 songs in the manner of Stax/Volt soul, then followed it in 1981 with a country covers album, Almost Blue. In the essay for that album, Costello explains that his first couple years as a pop star had been so personally and professionally exhausting that he craved a break from his own head. “I had developed the notion that I might better express my feelings through other people’s words and music,” he writes. “Country ballads suited my blue mood most of all.”

Costello’s mood has ebbed and flowed but generally improved since that time, but he’s never lost the desire to wear whatever stylistic hat suits his current whims. In the essay for King of America, his first album cut largely with session musicians (including a few who played in the original Elvis’ band), Costello explains why this mid-career shift into troubadour mode was so liberating:

During my visits to Hollywood, I found myself sitting around hotel rooms late at night with other songwriters, drinking and swapping stories and songs. This was entirely new to someone who had started out in the rather more insular and competitive London scene. I would meet a lot of interesting characters in [King of America producer] T-Bone [Burnett]’s company over the next few years, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Dixon, Harry Dean Stanton, Kris Kristofferson, and Lucinda Williams.

There’s a long and well-documented history of English musicians fleeing gray Britain for America. What differentiates Costello is the great leap he made to incorporate those genres into his own music, against expectations. This Year’s Model and Armed Forces, his first records with his rampaging band the Attractions, were quintessentially British, full of amphetamine-boosted tempos, rancorous class politics, and eloquent wordplay.

But the success of songs like “Pump It Up” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” seems to have activated Costello’s paranoid streak, sending him running, Dylan-like, for anything other than what audiences expected of him. Writing about his 1993 collaboration with the classical-minded Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, Costello recalls critics who accused him of suddenly straining for artistic respectability:

Clearly anyone who made such a statement had little or no knowledge of the critical hyperbole that can rain down on even the slightest talent before the bloom goes off the romance in pop music. I had found myself being taken too seriously and over-analysed from the very outset of my recording career.


All This Useless Beauty, Costello’s last record with the Attractions, was released in 1996 and reissued by Rhino in 2001. It’s a mature and ruminative album, full of songs that Costello had written either for or with other artists. “None of these lyrics contained any anger toward the characters,” he writes, “only disappointment that they had settled for so little. I could just as easily have been talking to myself.” Though he leaves the source of his self-disappointment unspecified, Costello hasn’t approached this kind of frankness in any interview or writing I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s particularly startling given that he was only five years removed from the record in question. But by then he had already inaugurated the obsessively dilettantish approach that has distinguished his post-Attractions career. Since 1996, Costello has appeared intent on leaving no creative opportunity untaken, whether hosting a talk show on basic cable or releasing a symphony, Il Sogno, in 2004.

It’s a career path that has put all but the most devoted fans off his scent, though the Costello revealed in these mini-memoirs is both more humble and more expressive than some disappointed fans might think him to be after the last 15 years. Whatever the merits of his recent albums (and a few are quite good indeed), he has come to embody a searching and catholic kind of musical fandom that only seems more appropriate now, when seemingly all of recorded history is available to anyone with an Internet connection. (His 2002 Vanity Fair article “Rocking Around the Clock,” which lists his favorite music for all 24 hours of the day, simply begs for a Spotify playlist.) Most musician memoirs are an indulgence for author and reader alike, but Costello’s is the rare one that actually conveys the musical mind and shows how complex and generous it can be.

Even if, like me, you’ve listened to 1982’s Imperial Bedroom countless times and admired the Attractions’ melding of styles over its 15 songs, it’s still stunning to read the tangle of allusions that Costello unravels in his essay. He explains that his listening habits at the time included Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, Erik Satie and Debussy, Miles Davis and the Left Banke. “Now as an adult,” he writes, “there was certainly something attractive about the way these records felt out of step with fashion and had a connection to so many musical threads.” That’s Costello’s late career in a sentence: chasing musical connections no matter how far afield of fashion they lead him. No wonder he took half a decade to write his memoirs—and then let them escape with a shrug.

[watercamp]

The Rhino/Edsel booklets are a must read for anyone that wants to know EC

Not top mention all the outtakes and demos and b sides on the bonus discs.

[thepopeofpop]

I'm thinking of putting all his writings together - not just the liner notes. In fact, I'm not just thinking of it, I've already done quite a fair bit of it. It makes a decentish book.

[johnfoyle]

I've assembled Elvis' liner notes in this format -






It's far easier to refer to than unfolding and squinting at the tiny print in the booklets. It cost about €10 to put together. As you may see it's 164 pages , has a word count of 79,615, is printed back to back and bound in a folder. It includes both the Rhino and Rykodisc notes. They do, of course, duplicate each other a lot but there are still a few little nuggets of info. exclusive to both and it's interesting to see Elvis 'revising' certain aspects of his story. It's, basically, a scan 'n paste from texts posted on this forum. I did a certain amount of proofreading but I still missed a lot of typos. I don't care - it's primarily for reference and I usually know the correct version of the words involved. I also have separate folders of print offs of anything else Elvis writes and puts up on the 'net, seeing as how it tends to vanish from his site as he upgrades etc. and , anyway, I prefer to read stuff on paper.

[wardo68]

I've done much of the same thing, cleaning up commas I don't like, italicizing and capitalizing when necessary. Haven't printed it up in a pretty package though.

[docinwestchester]

I've assembled Elvis' liner notes in this format -

Is there a downloadable version for Kindle? If so, sign me up now!

[Top balcony]

]

I've assembled Elvis' liner notes in this format -

John - and Wardo - wow- fantastic

Nevermind about doc's Kindle comments - can you put this on Dime for us paperlovers?

Colin Top Balcony