SKINHEAD NATIONAs a lot of people reading this will already know, the first book published by S.T. Publishing was Spirit Of ‘69 - A Skinhead Bible back in 1991. Originally, a mainstream publisher in London, UK, was going to release it, but after a few months of pissing me about, I decided to do it myself. At the time, I knew sweet Fanny Adams about the publishing game, but it’s amazing what you can achieve when a lorry turns up at your front door with a mountain of books and you know every last penny you have (and then some) is riding on the fact that you can shift them.I wrote Spirit Of ‘69 - A Skinhead Bible not because I think I’m some sort of expert on skinheads, but because I passionately believed that the history of the cult, warts and all, had to be written from the inside. Before Spirit Of ‘69, there had only ever been one skinhead book that sought to act as a guide to the skinhead cult - Nick Knight’s Skinhead (Omnibus Press). First published in 1982, it was largely meant as a vehicle for photographer Nick Knight’s skinhead portraits, but was padded out with a few pages on skinhead origins, music, dress, behaviour and the like. What really makes it worth having though is the section on fashion by Jim Ferguson, something that to this day is held in very high regard by skinheads all over the world, and particularly by those who choose to dress in the original skinhead style. Otherwise, the book was and is very much an outsider’s view of the cult, something that is underlined by the patronising mix of sociology theory and tabloid-based drivel.