Unexpected vinyl art

British designer Patrick Fry has built up a fascinating publishing enterprise, called CentreCentre, by making limited-edition books about the curious and overlooked. Fry favours the word ‘unexpected’ for his subjects. Brick Index is a collection of beautifully photographed single bricks; Print Punch is about computer punch cards – essential items for data storage and programming in the days of mainframe computers. Some of the early 1960s examples in Print Punch were made from ‘Arcoschede’ – a product Fedrigoni made for IBM Europe in the Italian town of Arco.

Reverses, a co-production with London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, displays the backs of works on paper in the museum’s collection. To Evelyn is a collection of entertainers’ posters and showcards from a working men’s club in a Yorkshire coalmining village.

The latest CentreCentre book, Sleeve Notes, a collection of music fan art found in a record shop in Upminster (UK). Most of the images, artwork and writing were added to the original blank inner sleeves that protected the vinyl. There are scribbled notes, collages, cartoons, copied logos and colourful portraits. One looks a bit like typewriter art. They were chosen and photographed by Dominique Russell, an artist and documentarian interested in what she calls, ‘ephemeral objects, DIY culture, kitsch and “tat”’. Russell found the sleeves in Crazy Beat Records, the record shop run by her father Kevan, who explains his foreword that, ‘many of these distinctive sleeves exist because the originals were lost, stolen or damaged.’

Fry’s CentreCentre books have a distinctive look and feel, with good use made of uncoated paper stocks, and tactile covers. The endpapers of Reverses and To Evelyn were on Sirio, while the cover of Print Punch was on Woodstock. For Sleeve Notes, the cover is on Sirio and the dust jacket is on Materica.