Reggae music and the Jamaican culture have been given another boost with the recent recognition of Reggae Scrapbook as the Best Music Book of 2007, having won the Silver Medal at the Los Angeles annual Book Expo of America (BEA) .

The book, written by well known musicologist and reggae historian, Roger Steffens and photojournalist, Peter Simon known for his acclaimed Reggae Bloodline, has been receiving rave reviews for its colourful archival value and worth with tremendous memorabilia interspersed with magnificent photographers and historical data on the music.

Steffens... It's a major and unexpected coup for reggae

"It's a major and unexpected coup for reggae," Steffens said about his and Simon's recent documentation of reggae for which the legendary Toots Hibbert wrote the foreword. The project also features contributions from Jamaican photographer, Roy Sweetland.

According to Steffens, author Stephen Davis, who wrote the introduction, told him that," of all his (Davis') books, including several best-sellers, he's never had one reviewed in the Sunday Times." In its review, New York's Sunday Times noted that the authors "...share their addiction in Reggae Scrapbook, a dazzling homage to the music and its birthplace".

Reggae Scrapbook, is a collectors item of everything reggae, featuring numerous goodies scattered throughout, from CDs to DVDs, posters, show-cards and endless photos of collages of all the iconic figures in reggae.

The legendary Toots Hibbert in the forward wrote in parts; "Reggae has been around now for forty years. I know dis fe'true, because I wrote the first song that let people know that we called our music reggae. If you ask me how I came to write it, the answer is that I didn't come to write that song, Do the Reggay, it just came to me. I didn't invent it, it just happened, and then I wrote the song from pure inspiration."

Stephen Davis in his introduction of Reggae Scrapbook, gave an explicit acknowledgement of how much the entire reggae movement owes to Bob Marley. "Not only did he participate in every phase of late twentieth-century Jamaican culture - ska, rock steady, reggae, rockers, and the reggae/rock hybrid he deployed to tour the world - but he also projected his millenarian faith and unshakeable beliefs so effectively, so swingingly, that by the age of thirty-six, when he died, he'd risen from the slums of Kingston to become a champion of human rights and dignity for the entire world." Davis notes.

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