Richard Chapman -Books

In 1991 I was approached to write a book about playing the guitar by the publishers Dorling Kindersley. ‘The Complete Guitarist’ came out in March 1993 and went on to become the world’s most successful guitar book. It sold over a million copies and achieved colossal numbers of library, school and college loans. It did particularly well in the US and UK and I was pleased and surprised.

The Complete Guitarist has been tremendously influential and many of my innovative ideas and ways of presenting concepts have been widely adopted by players, teachers and writers. There is no doubt that writing this book and generating music with graphic design elements was a good process for me as a guitarist and it opened up fresh perspectives. The book contains both standard materials and quite a lot of my own original approaches to playing the guitar and creating music. I saw it as an opportunity to provide a wide range of source material for the mass market and hoped that it would encourage people to be individually creative. Also I was keen to break down the boundaries between genres. I’m a serious musician, not really a writer, and for a small number of people my work has been challenging and controversial.

I wrote a second book for DK called ‘Guitar; Music History Players’ which was an overview of all types of guitar music and this came out in 2000. After this I made up my mind to return to playing the guitar and composing full time and I decided not to take up some kind of parallel career as an author.

The Complete Guitarist was expanded, updated and relaunched in 2003 as ‘The New Complete Guitarist’ and this new edition was an improvement. Subsequently a small book called ‘Guitar’ in the DK Eyewitness Companions format came out in 2005. This mainly consists of simplified material from the first two books put together by editors and I added a chord dictionary and a number of new elements.

These titles have sold in over fifty countries and have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Slovakian, Turkish, Finnish and probably a few other languages as well! English language editions have done well in Germany, Scandinavia, China and India.

It means a great deal to me that these books help and inspire people and I have received hundreds of tremendous reviews and very appreciative emails and letters from people all over the world. I’d like to thank everyone for their kind words and enthusiastic feedback.

*These books are not for sale through this site. They are available from bookshops, internet sites and libraries.