Brian Roylance, 60, Publisher of Elaborate Rock Books, Is Dead
NY Times
Brian Roylance, an English publisher whose company, Genesis Publications, turned rock into history with hand-crafted, autographed limited editions of musicians’ memoirs and photography collections, died on Tuesday in Guildford, England. He was 60.
His son, Nicholas, said that Mr. Roylance died during a soccer game with friends, apparently of a heart attack.
Mr. Roylance’s company published books by George Harrison (including his memoir, “I Me Mine,” and two books of reproduced lyric manuscripts) and Ringo Starr (”Postcards From the Boys,” a collection of postcards sent to him by the other Beatles), as well as “Sometime in New York,” a collection of Bob Gruen’s photographs of John Lennon. Among the other Beatles-related books Mr. Roylance published were “Fifty Years Adrift,” a memoir by Derek Taylor, who worked for the Beatles in various capacities in the 1960’s and again in the 1990’s, and “Playback,” an autobiography by the group’s record producer, George Martin.
Mr. Roylance also published photography collections by Astrid Kirchherr, Jurgen Vollmer and Max Scheler, who photographed the Beatles during their early years as a Hamburg bar band. And he issued an edition that included reproductions of paintings by Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bassist, who left the band to pursue his art career but died in 1962. As a result of his work on various Beatles-related projects, starting with Harrison’s “I Me Mine” in 1980, Mr. Roylance was enlisted by Apple, the group’s company, to assemble “The Beatles Anthology,” a book based on the band’s video autobiography. It was published by Chronicle in 2000.
The success of his Beatles projects also opened other doors in the rock music world for Mr. Roylance. Among the company’s publications are books devoted to Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Brian Wilson, the Who, Pink Floyd and Ravi Shankar.
Blinds & Shutters
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:13 am
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