Paul Vernon is perhaps the first record collector-dealer to ever have a book written about him – even if he wrote it himself. Many VJM readers will be familiar with the man who worked with Trevor Benwell on VJM during the 1970s, then launched his own iconoclastic Sailor's Delight filled with cheeky humor and great post-war blues 78s and LPs. (He finally comes clean about the bogus Robert Johnson photograph that appeared in SD about the same time Steve LaVere located the real one – about time, Paul.)

Unlike VJM, Paul filled up SD's pages with his own records which required him to scrounge the world to find them – and the collecting escapades in doing so are duly recorded in the current work with aplomb and good humor. Later, Paul was a pioneer in documenting and reissuing traditional world music, particularly in Portugal, Greece, West Africa – an effort aided enormously by being one of the privileged few to gain access to the legendary EMI archives, which have the most complete files on recording activity around the world (not to mention hard copies of the 78s) anywhere. He also worked with cartoonist Gene Deitch in reissuing a privately recorded tape of John Lee Hooker's earliest performances.

The reason Paul could pull off the feat of gaining entrance to EMI, and other ventures in his life is the reason why this book was published – he's got a surplus of good humor and knowledge of the blues that he sprinkles liberally throughout the book.

The book is a lot of fun to read and a welcome relief from the fawning, pretentious scholarship of many blues books. Read it over a weekend and have a laugh over a true character.

VJM (March 2008)

As they occasionally say in Parliament, let me declare an interest or two – my name appears twice in this book and I first met Paul 'Sailor' Vernon close to forty years ago, without either of us ever pretending to be bosom buddies from then until now.

I've always tolerantly observed his unvarnished lust for life and he has always tolerantly observed my unbridled need for yet more vinyl and shellac. That's probably the essence of a warm and mutually beneficial acquaintanceship. Sailor has had many careers in his close to sixty summers; to name but a few, pub barman, newsagent, rare record dealer, world music researcher, blues and gospel filmographer and – not least – the first editor of 'Blues & Rhythm' magazine.

So it was with considerable interest that I scanned an email sent on New Year's Day 2008, wherein Sailor informed me that his autobiography was now all present and correct for inspection, and in the past few weeks I've had many hours of harmless (I don't do the other kind any more!) two-handed fun in reading and re-reading most – if not quite all – of his life story thus far.

The first five chapters of Sailor's book may not be of interest to the purist blues freak reader, but they strike a resonant chord with those of us who grew up in London and its environs in the 1960s and became hooked on the music we still love, in Paul's case largely through listening to the Stones' first few recordings.

One hilarious firework story aside, the book really takes off when Sailor starts frequenting – as did I about the same time – the famous and sadly long-departed Dobell's Record Shop on London's Charing Cross Road, the folk and blues department of this store being run, in Sailor's words, by its 'truculently affable manager, Ray Bolden'. Ray, a monster drinker, had a imbibing crew of impressive dimensions, including fellow Dobell-ites John Kendall and Trevor 'The Bear' Salter, along with chums such as Indian Arthur, who would invariably greet you with a ringing, "Da, mate!" and whose major party-piece of suddenly collapsing in the pub earned him the soubriquet of 'The Dimmer', although his secondary party-piece led to Ray affectionately referring to Artie as 'The Asian Incontinent'.

Sailor also provides a whistle-stop tour of other establishments in and around the Charing Cross Road at that time, such as the oldy-worldy tobacconists (Snuff Smiths, we called it) across the road from Dobell's drinking club around the corner, presided over by a seriously dangerous individual known only as 'Cottage Gerry', an Irish Guardsman who had escaped from a WWII POW camp by strangling two of the guards and who had beaten up two emissaries sent by the Kray Twins to offer protection – Gerry could more than capably manage for himself, ta very much!

After affectionate memories of the AFBF tours the 1960s and the many and varied blues performers who visited London in the early 1970s, Sailor moves his story along to the latter half of the 1970s when he he first started mining the motherlode of record collections that became available for purchase in the UK and then in the USA. Two of the finest of these were the collections of Bob Hite and Henry Vestine, of Canned Heat, and I still vividly recall those insane Sunday 'Sailors Delight' afternoons at Paul's house in Mill Hill after Sailor arrived back from foreign climes, groaning at the weight of so many stupidly rare 78s and 45s that most of us oiks (Mike Rowe and Bruce Bastin being honourable exceptions) either didn't know existed, or which we arrogantly rejected as having horns on board – we were exceptionally dim in those far-flung days!

Sailor is particularly good at sharp vignettes of the various nutters (I count myself amongst them) that comprised his record-collecting clientele; could anybody please explain why record collecting – indeed, any collecting – is very largely a male preserve? Whatever, I count myself extremely fortunate to have acquired such gems as the Juke Boy Bonner Irma 78 (Paul brought back 12 mint copies that he found in Chris Strachwitz's stock) and the Eddie Riff 45 on Dover, which is a record confined almost exclusively to those UK collectors to whom Sailor sold it.

Although the front cover of the book proclaims it to be 'the unexpurgated memoirs of...', that is immediately contradicted by the back cover – 'I'm not THAT stupid'! Various stories known to a number of us are omitted; Sailor's first marriage – he admits that he treated his wife much as an absentee landlord cares for his tenants – is given rather short shrift, and his second wife hides, for some reason, under a pseudonym. At least one important relationship at the height of the late 70s to early/mid-'80s insane and (perhaps in part giving rise to) the most ego and substance-fuelled part of Sailor's life is not mentioned at all and a few highly embarrassing episodes are left to moulder (one tiny arcane clue aside) in oblivion, which is where they best belong and I'm not going to resurrect them here or anywhere else.

The last twenty years plus of Paul's life, including the years spent in San Francisco, Prague (including the incredible John Lee Hooker 1951 private recordings discovery), Toulouse and Madrid, are dealt with in a fairly brief forty-odd pages; perhaps that is in part because he is now a much older and wiser matelot, who has seen the effect on himself that an essentially self-centred existence (as he freely admits) has had on his continued well-being.

But enough of analysis – this book is not meant as a sociological study of the effect of the blues on a NW London geezer; rather, it is written to make people laugh along with – not at – Paul and it certainly achieves that noble aim. So whether you are one of Paul's many friends, one of his few detractors, or just somebody who really doesn't know the guy at all, but wants to know more and have a good number of laughs along the way, I do recommend that you beg, borrow but preferably not steal a copy of what is, as Sailor describes it, a description of a love affair with music, at which blues/r&b is at the core, over the past 45-odd years – 'the true essence of being alive'. Aye aye, Sailor and thanks.

Chris Bentley, Blues & Rhythm (April 2008)

Readers familiar with Sailor's Delight won't be surprised that the narrative is informed, affectionate, often poignant and always replete with zany humour. It'll have you rushing for a dry handkerchief one moment, and a clean pair of underwear the next. Adorned with Dave Clarke's original SD cartoons, this is essential for every blues fan with a sense of humour.

Record Collector (May 2008)

Clutching a box of impossibly rare blues 78s and trailing mentholated smoke, Sailor Vernon came bustin' outta the quiet Mill Hill house which he'd renamed Ora-Nelle Villas in 1978 to lay some serious blues on an unsuspecting world. For six years his inspired and irreverent magazine Sailor's Delight offered lashings of tasty blues and R&B records for sale, their lists sandwiched between features which ranged from serious research, through blues-related travelogues and splendid cartoons, to label spoofs (who could forget the epic saga of Memphis' Fun label?) and sheer goonery. Ora-Nelle Villas, and in particular its Dexion-shelved back room groaning under the weight of vinyl and shellac, was a Mecca for anyone who wanted records that you never saw anywhere else. From Japan, from the USA, or in this writer's case from Gloucester Place, London W1 they came, to feast their eyes on the records and feast their bodies on the tea and cakes unflaggingly supplied by ever-welcoming Linda, departing many hours later with lighter wallets, heavier record cases, glazed grins and satisfied burps. Then suddenly, in 1984, it was all over; the Sailor vanished from the London blues scene so quickly and completely that it was as if he'd emerged from a hole in the ground six years previously and had now burrowed back down it.

Many of us had no idea what Paul Vernon had been up to before SD, and heard only third-hand rumours of what became of him subsequently. Don't worry: this autobiography covers the madcap SD years, but also What Sailor Did First and What Sailor Did Next. We learn of his boyhood, helping his parents in their North London shop and their Hertford pub, his discovery of the blues in the early 1960s (via The Rolling Stones, like many of his generation) and his encouragement by his musically-inclined father) a source of envy to those of us who can still distantly hear words like 'Switch that damned thing off", enunciated in strident parental tones, ringing in their ears 40 years on), his first steps into record dealing, the quasi-religious experience of witnessing his favourite blues legends on stage, and the gestation of the magazine. He paints vivid pictures of record' buying adventures throughout the USA, archive-delving at MCPS, discovering world music through Portuguese fado (a posh Iberian dog?), and finding happiness on a third-time-lucky basis with American diplomat Judy, with whom he's lived in some of Europe's most beautiful cities. Ah, that's why we couldn't find him, then.

The Sailor is, quite properly, at centre stage throughout the book, but his rich cast of supporting characters includes many who will be familiar to long-serving readers of this magazine: tireless researchers, promoters and chroniclers of the blues such as Mike Rowe, Bill Greensmith, Bruce Bastin and Dave Clarke (several of whose original SD cartoons adorn the book's pages). But a cast is of little use without a decent script, and Paul's prose, reverential in parts, rosily nostalgic in others, poignant in places and laced with just plain daft humour throughout, brings the story vividly to life. During the few hours which it took to devour its 200-odd pages, this writer needed to change his handkerchief and his underwear with equal frequency. It's such a rollicking read that one can even forgive him for forgetting the correct name of Worthington White Shield; after all, it was a long time ago. Perhaps one should qualify that: it's a rollicking good read as far as it goes. It would have been instructive to have had an insight into Paul's dramatic mental breakdown circa 1983, when he was found wandering in a suburban park unaware of where, or indeed who, he was. The more salacious reader would have revelled in the saga of Sailor's delight in dallying with a Splendidly Buxom Chanteuse, but it's omitted, perhaps to avoid the possibility of a splendidly buxom lawsuit.

The Sailor plans to relinquish his commission and head off to small-town USA retirement pretty soon. His pension fund would, therefore, be most grateful if you bought a copy of the book. You'll be pleased that you did, too.

Mike Atherton, Juke Blues (Spring 2008)