(It Books/Harper Collins)

www.harpercollins.com

BY FRED MILLS

You'd be forgiven for squinting a few extra times at the recently published Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls (It Books/Harper Collins) and its $50 price tag. With its deluxe, boxed set-styled packaging and gimmicky design - numerous fold-out pages; several "pockets" that house reproductions of concert tickets, programs, press releases, even a 2-sided repro of a 1975 issue of Melody Maker; not to mention the inclusion of an audio CD featuring a 1977 Jimmy Page interview for Trouser Press - one might imagine that Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls, written by veteran Seattle scribe Charles R. Cross, would turn out to be long on style, short on substance, just another instance of collector catnip published in time for the holiday shopping season.

Well, sure; there's definitely some of that going on here. Publishing houses aren't stupid, and music bios rarely hit the New York Times bestsellers' list anyway, so if there's a unique angle that can be exploited to drive sales - particularly when it's an artist or band like Led Zeppelin about whom, let's face it, there's not really anything new to say - why not?

Still, I initially looked somewhat askance at LZ:STTOS when it arrived. The last few years we've seen equally gimmicky, and pricey, volumes dedicated to the Velvet Underground (the recent The Velvet Underground: New York Art is, like the Led Zeppelin book, $50 - and if you spring for the "Deluxe Edition" it'll you back 300 bucks); John Lennon, Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison (The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, The Grateful Dead Scrapbook and The Jim Morrison Scrapbook, featuring Bob-, Jerry- and Lizard King-related facsimiles and interview CDs) and Kurt Cobain (Cobain Unseen, likewise, includes sundry artifact repros). The latter four, incidentally, have in common the design company Becker & Mayer whose specialty is "innovative, high-quality, illustrated books."

Book publishers have taken to calling the addition of memorabilia and tchotchkes to books "interactive features," a term which to most consumers would suggest something a bit more digital in nature than the overtly analog experience a book provides. But again, as with my comments in the second paragraph, above, why not? Your appreciation for these undertakings, and indeed, your willingness to go into hock to own them, is directly proportional to your obsession with the artist in question; the more casual - fiscally prudent; "sane" - fan is usually happy with a straightforward, well-researched and -written biography.

At any rate, LZ:STTOS is a handsome affair no matter how you pilot it, dotted with photos, record sleeves and posters that even many of the staunchest Zep fans probably haven't seen before. For example, one particularly candid B&W photo shows Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in Boston 1969, standing in what appears to be a filthy tiled-floor corridor; they look... puzzled, or at least waiting for something to happen, with Jones holding a small zeppelin-shaped helium balloon. (Perhaps they were about to do a photo shoot?) Elsewhere, a 1980 European tour poster depicts a man in a military-styled jacket and flat-brimmed helmet gazing skyward: the explanatory text calls the iconic image "one of many never explained by the band," adding that it's one of the most collectible Zep posters. And of course there are tons of live photos, among them, a long shot of the band at Oakland 1977 on the outdoors Stonehenge-themed stage that the Bill Graham organization had built - no minor source of inspiration some years later to the mockumentary-minded folks behind This Is Spinal Tap.

Text-wise the book has heft, too. Cross' bonafides as a journalist and a writer are long-established - in fact, he previously co-authored the 1991 Zep book Heaven and Hell, and he's although got a couple of Kurt Cobain/Nirvana books on his CV - and here, true to his stated intention not to just rehash old, well-worn war stories about Led Zeppelin, he achieves, as he puts it, "a songs first" treatment of the band. Each chapter roughly concerns the making of and events proximate to a specific Zep album, with the first chapter detailing how the band initially came together and the final one covering the last tour and John Bonham's death through the subsequent reunions (Live Aid, the Atlantic Records' 40^th Anniversary bash, the December 2007 concert at London's O2 Arena).

At 98 pages and liberally decorated with visuals, LZ:STTOS isn't an exhaustive or definitive narrative and it doesn't pretend to be. Rather, it's an entertaining read that recaps the basic tale alongside a skillful and contextual appreciation of the music itself - while, of course, offering up a liberal dose of the aforementioned collector catnip.