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Alan Lenhoff

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Posts posted by Alan Lenhoff

    Classic Keyboards for your coffee table

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    Thanks for thinking of the authors! But the truth is that we're happy for you to order from Amazon, Target.com, Barnes and Noble, etc. This was a 7-year labor of love. There's really no profit for an author on an expensive-to-print niche book like this. We spent more than a year searching for a publisher who "got" what we wanted to do, and negotiating hard. The tough contract talks weren't designed to maximize our share of the revenue, they were designed to ensure that the book was published exactly how we envisioned it: Hardcover (with printing directly on the cover, rather than a dust jacket that would get ripped-up after a couple of years), large size pages, high quality paper stock, 400+ pages, 560 photos, etc. We just didn't want to make any compromises on the quality. (Getting a grant to help subsidize the high printing costs helped, too.)

     

    We figured we had one shot to really do this right, and we were determined to do so. No book is perfect, but reader reaction (check out the Amazon reviews) suggests we did pretty well.

     

    Alan

    Classic Keyboards for your coffee table

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    Thanks to Marc Myers, music journalist, historian and author, for these kind words yesterday about Classic Keys on his award-winning jazz blog, JazzWax.com:

     

    BOOK OF LOVE: If you love rock and electronic keyboards, Alan S. Lenhoff and David E. Robertson have just published Classic Keys: Keyboard Sounds That Launched Rock Music (University of North Texas Press). The 406-page coffee table book is beautifully written and features page after page of photos of electronic keyboards that gave rock its personality. There are in-depth chapters on the Hammond B-3, the Vox Continental, the Farfisa Compact, the Hohner Clavinet, the Minimoog, the Wurlitzer, the Hohner Pianet and many others. Each chapter is loaded with history about their development, the rock bands that used them and hits that featured them. Enormous fun reading through while listening to vintage vinyl.

     

    ClassicKeysBook.com

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1574417762/

     

    Alan

    Classic Keyboards for your coffee table

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    We really appreciate all the kind words.

     

    The Real MC noted: "I have some guitar books made out of nice paper stock with excellent photos, and I have to say it is about damn time we had a keyboard book with similar quality." (And Paul and Sam echoed that thought.) That's exactly what we set out to do. Classic Keys was meant to be a keepsake book that keyboard people would enjoy for many years.

     

    A niche book like this lives and dies on word-of-mouth recommendations, so please tell your friends!

     

    Thanks,

     

    Alan

    Classic Keyboards for your coffee table

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    Just wanted to thank everyone for the kind words about the book. We did it for people like you, who share our love for these special instruments. (Also, it was a convenient excuse for both of the authors to fill our homes with even more vintage keys. That alone was worth the time and labor we put into this project!) ;-)

     

    And now that the book is done, yes Dave, I'd love to hang out here more often.

     

    Alan

     

     

     

    Classic Keyboards for your coffee table

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    I am the co-author of "Classic Keys: Keyboard Sounds That Launched Rock Music." When the book was released in December, I did not post about it on this forum because of the rules against using the forum to promote products. But I'm pleased that this group has discovered the book without my help. It was a seven year labor of love for me and my Australian co-author (and photographer) David Robertson.

     

    Alan Lenhoff

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