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For our yearly commemoration of Bob Marley’s birth date, Feb. 6, 1945, we have a fascinating feature that illustrates the worldwide recognition of the Jamaican superstar. For the 2009 annual Bob Marley collector’s edition of The Beat, guest writer Joe Jurgensen compiled a comprehensive list of books about Marley, titled “In the Book of Life: The Marley Bibliography.” This extensive list, clearly a labor of love, is broken down into categories:
Biographies (30)
Discographies (9)
Photography Books (11)
Illustration (10)
Songbooks (5)
and Category Unto Their Own Books (6)
The numbers after each category indicate the number of titles included, a total of 106 books each with a capsule review or comment. As this was compiled in 2009, it’s very likely that the number of Marley-related books has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. Case in point: two more newly published books were reviewed by The Beat’s founding editor Roger Steffens in this same issue, and we have included these as well.
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One more recent title in particular bears mentioning: Roger’s highly recommended oral history of Marley, So Much Things to Say, was published in 2018 and undoubtedly deserves a category unto itself.
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Joe Jurgensen, the author of this feature, published Bob Marley: The Complete Annotated Bibliography in 2009 and it is available on Amazon. He also created a blog devoted to Marley and Wailers books, that is current through 2012.
READ OR DOWNLOAD PDFS HERE: Bob By the Book, and Marley Book Beat