Richard Hipgrave

The original, hardback, version of this book came out in the 1980s.

We'd dabbled in putting on gigs, student journalism and record reviews in the 1960s and 70s, and we were both involved in pub quiz teams.

The book seemed an obvious way of capturing and organising the huge amount of trivial junk that we'd acquired in the 1960s.

Most of the junk was, of course, concerned in some way with pieces of plastic that rotated at 33 or 45 rpm and were treated with more reverence than anything covered by the school curriculum.

Using the trivia quiz book format gave us the chance to take a slightly off-the-wall approach to covering the social history of the 1960s, the politics, music and sport.

We really enjoyed the experience of working on it together - despite living at opposite ends of the world.

The book was well-received, and it has always been in demand in the second-hand market.

Knowing that someone laughs or learns from what you've written is a great motivator, and we thought that it would be fun to revise and extend the original hard copy book as an e-book.

As authors, the e-book model works well for us: it's nice to be free of the pressure of deadlines, and to have the control and flexibility that comes with e-book publishing and distribution.

For the book's cover we wanted something that captured the spirit of the 1960s - and something not too arty or pretentious.

People wore lots of badges in the 1960s which seemed to fit, and the badges on our cover also tell you something about what's going to be in the book.