The Beau Hunks’ back room boy

Piet Schreuders, the back room boy of The Beau Hunks, has returned from another of his adventures excavating the lost cities of 20th Century popular culture. Along with fellow researchers Mark Lewisohn and Adam Smith he arrives with a revised and updated version of their book The Beatles’ London. And he’s got a film to show, demonstrating the sort of in-depth investigation this discipline requires.

But you mustn’t think that Mr Schreuders' work in the field of Beatleology is monomania. He is a leading expert in numerous other areas of pop culture archæology. His voluminous researches for The Beau Hunks on the works of composers Leroy Shield and Raymond Scott are outstanding examples of his dedication, as are his efforts in the restoration and re-issuing of long out of print Dutch Little Golden Books. 

His day job is doing layouts, or as the hoity-toity ones call it, graphic design. And of course, the summit meeting point of these fields of research and layout is the information graphic. Mr Schreuders has an extensive collection of a particularly fine form of information graphic, the Dell Mapback paperback designs.

Also in the field of paperback art, he is responsible for a fine book on that old master of jacket art, James Avati, written with co-author Kenneth Fulton. Incidentally the book features a very fine information graphic on the evolution of paperback cover design.

One of his most complex projects integrating meticulous pop culture archaeology with information graphics must be his reconstruction of Main Street, Culver City, California, as it was recorded in the late 1920s in Laurel and Hardy short films. The results of this research were presented in print in issue 19 of the occasional magazine Furore, and as a digital 3D model in the TV documentary De Bril van Piet Schreuders. 

More power to him!