I finally managed to get my hands on all the vintage t-shirt books published in the last few years. Truth be told, I would recommend any book that contains photos of vintage tees, even if it was scribed in crayon by a two-year-old child.

Title: Vintage Rock T-Shirts

Meet the author: Johan Kugelberg makes records and cooks dinner; and when he’s not doing that he’s writing books inspired by music. For this book he delves deep into the t-shirt collection of New York’s legendary vintage clothiers, “What Goes Around Comes Around.”   

Number of shirts inside: 300+

Rating: 5/5

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

Meet the holy grail of vintage t-shirt books; and the only one that truly embodies the spirit of rock ‘n roll.

The writing is a lot like lyrics from your favorite tune: sometimes it doesn’t make sense, yet you fully comprehend its meaning, mostly because you’re making up your own.

Just like all the legendary bands featured within, the designers of the book didn’t care about breaking a few rules. At times you’ll be squinting to read text irresponsibly placed over non-contrasting backgrounds or blinded by other busy layouts. It’s no coincidence that reading it will make you feel like you’ve just left a concert: your senses have been jolted, you’ll probably have a slight headache, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Enough about the creativity of the renegade design, what about the t-shirts?” asks you. It’s the best collection of vintage t-shirts I have ever seen. Like me, if you have obsessed about all things vintage t-shirts over the years, you probably think you have seen it all. Think again, Mr. Magoo. This book features shirts that you will likely never see for sale on eBay. There’s only a handful of tees in the book that I have had my hands on. And for the most part, the rest I didn’t even know existed. Before my time? Yeah, that’s my excuse, since all the tees featured are from the ’60s and ’70s. These shirts were born to the pre-mass-produced merchandising era that ran wild in the ’80s.

The sizes of the featured garments are a true indication of their age. Most of the shirts pictured could only be modeled by skinny men, petite women, and even a classroom of children. It was a time when our kids had yet to consume steroid-filled steaks, and we weren’t filling our bellies with too many burgers. A time when our rock stars and their fans were still skinny, which is also made evident by these subjects in the book’s great vintage photography.

Don’t worry, the book itself is very fat – more than 250 pages jam-packed with vintage t-shirt goodness.   

I recommend adding this book to your collection, or else stop calling yourself a vintage aficionado.   

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

Additional Vintage T-Shirt Book Reviews.

I finally managed to get my hands on all the vintage t-shirt books published in the last few years. Truth be told, I would recommend any book that contains photos of vintage tees, even if it was scribed in crayon by a two year old child.

Title: Vintage T-Shirts

Meet the authors: Lisa Kidner and Sam Knee are fashion retailers and designers, selling their clothes under the Heart of Glass and Upper Fifth labels. They sell authentic vintage t-shirts from stalls at London’s Portobello, Camden, and Spitafields markets.  

Number of shirts inside: 500+

Rating: 4.5/5

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

This book starts off with a great personal introduction to the authors, explaining how a pink shirt tickled their book-writing fancies. Then the introduction preemptively zips the lips of the nay-sayers. This tells me the authors know the goings-on in the minds of those passionate about vintage t’s. “Did you forget X purposely, and why is Y in here?!” are question they need not answer. They’re well aware no book could be the be-all end-all of vintage tees publications. 

Humble introductions aside, this book is actually the closest any have come to the bible of vintage t-shirt books – mainly because it contains more than 500 tees, which doubles that of any book I have in my possession. Yes, they branch out to various genres, not just vintage band t-shirts, and that’s part of the beauty. Don’t worry, you’ll get your rock tee fix too. Their collection has the broadest coverage of musical styles – not just rock – which sets it aside from other books. If that’s music to your ears, then you’ll be happy to hear about the assortment of sought-after vintage tshirt genres, like skateboard, surf, bmx, movie, and so on.

All of this content takes place over the course of 300+ nicely laid out pages featuring vintage photography, great interviews with collectors, and images of related memorabilia and advertising.

The only thing I do say nay to is their proposed battle between printing techniques, screen printing and heat transfer. There really is no comparison; screen printing is better by far, and the top choice of collectors. Heat transfers that were created 20+ years ago are still kicking around in huge quantities, still going unsold in lots on eBay, and still waiting to be pressed on new shirts. Meanwhile, the ones that were actually put to use are now deteriorating, cracking, and fading beyond recognition. While there is a kitschy novelty factor to them, I would have preferred the few featured in this book to have been replaced by more of the excellent screen print selections.

I highly recommend adding this book to your collection. 

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

Additional Vintage T-Shirt Book Reviews.

I finally managed to get my hands on all the vintage t-shirt books published in the last few years. Truth be told, I would recommend any book that contains photos of vintage tees, even if it was scribed in crayon by a two year old child.

Title: Rock Tease: The Golden Years of Rock T-shirts

Meet the authors: Erica Easley graduated from Colombia University, worked at Warner Brothers, created ads at J. Walter Thompson and devoted much of her life to being a clotheshorse. Ed Chalfa owns a Portland’s largest and most celebrated resale shop, the Red Light Clothing Exchange. His collection of vintage rock t-shirts is worth over $30,000.

Number of shirts inside: 200+

Rating: 3/5

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

I admit the first thing I do when I pick up any vintage t-shirt book is furiously flip through it, taking in all the glorious photos, and this book was no exception. Over 200 of them, and plenty amazing designs even the vintage aficionado has never seen before.

Spectacular t-shirts aside, I found this particular vintage t-shirt book to be the most conservatively written amongst the bunch. It reads somewhat like a school text book or a university paper on the subject, which is kind of ironic given the creative subject matter, and, well, it’s cover.

The introduction is way too long. Although it contains lots of great information, I labored through it, always tempted to skip forward and start gazing at the tees again, or even stare at the cover one more time. Some of the shirt analysis feels a little too interpretive, almost like the authors felt as though they had to come up with something insightful about every design. I’m pretty sure they put way more thought in to some of these designs than the bootleggers did.

And if I had to waiver a guess, most of these comments were probably written more by Erica Easley than Ed Chalfa. Case in point – one of the comments written about an Iron Maiden tie dye shirt refers to their mascot as a “tweaked corpse with guns ablaze”. While a very good point is made about the rarity of a Maiden tie die, to Maiden fans, and most fans of vintage t-shirts, that “tweaked corpse” has a name. It’s Eddie and he’s the most iconic rock t-shirt mascot that has ever lived, and is well deserving of a book of his own. Not knowing this is a little bit of a rock tee faux pas, especially in a book devoted to the subject. Something tells me Ed Chalfa, possessing over $30,000 worth of rock shirts, and sharing the same name, is probably on a first name basis with Eddie.

The book does feature the most impressive amount of bootlegs designs of any of the books, which are just as much a part of rock tee history as the ones with copyrights on them. One of the bootlegs includes a shocking Ozzy Osbourne jersey with KKK imagery and a very good point is made regarding one of the downsides of bootlegging.

I recommend adding this book to your library.

Buy it: Amazon / eBay

Additional Vintage T-Shirt Book Reviews.