When David Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016, the publishing industry was quick to address grieving fans. At the end of June, Dey Street published On Bowie by Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield, author of 2007’s Love Is a Mix Tape. In August, Gallery released The Age of Bowie by British music journalist Paul Morley, who was artistic advisor to the curators of David Bowie Is, a retrospective organized by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013.
The coming season brings various reissues, novelty titles, and books including David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, Nov.). This title paints a portrait of the musician via a collection of interviews, beginning with his first, with the BBC in 1964 (when he was 17-year-old David Jones and not yet a public figure), to his last, which Melville House is keeping a secret until publication.
In January 2017, St. Martin’s is releasing Spider from Mars by Woody Woodmansey, the drummer for and last surviving member of Bowie’s backing band in the early 1970s, the Spiders from Mars. Woodmansey played on a quartet of albums that brought Bowie to international stardom—from 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World to 1973’s Aladdin Sane—and in this memoir, he gives a firsthand account of recording sessions, tours, and the excesses that eventually broke the band apart. Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longtime producer, contributed the foreword.
Expect plenty more titles to follow; here’s a sampling of what’s on the way.
Life on Tour with Bowie
Sean Mayes. Music Press, Oct.
Mayes, who died in 1995, played keyboard on Bowie’s 1978 world tour. Kevin Cann, a Bowie biographer, edited Mayes’s diaries for this book, originally published in 1999.
David Bowie Retrospective and Coloring Book
Mel Elliott. Watson-Guptill, Nov.
British artist Elliott specializes in celebrity-focused adult coloring books, which she’s published with mainstream houses as well as under her own brand. Color Me Swoon (TarcherPerigee, 2013), which depicts Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal, and many others, has sold more than 12,000 print copies per Nielsen BookScan; Colour Me Good: Benedict Cumberbatch (I Love Mel, 2014) has sold more than 9,000 copies, per BookScan.
David Bowie Play Book
Matteo Guarnaccia and Giulia Pivetta.
ACC Editions, Dec.
This activity book aimed at adult Bowie fans features paper dolls to cut out, illustrations of 1970s platform boots to color in, and much more.
Strange Fascination
David Buckley. Chicago Review, Jan. 2017
First published in 1999 and most recently updated in 2005, the new
edition of this biography provides details about the last dozen years of Bowie’s life and work, through new interviews conducted by the author.