Paul saw his first professional football match in 1967, has travelled the football world extensively and is a veteran of over 1,000 matches involving Sunderland AFC. He was the major contributing author to Sunderland AFC's Official History published in 1999, has written many other football books since and contributed to A Love Supreme, the award-winning fanzine.

From the mid 1990's he wrote for the football club's Legion of Light magazine and was the first editor of their official website now safc.com. Paul's family have had a relationship with the Wearside club for nearly 100 years as his Grandfather first saw Sunderland AFC play as far back as 1921. Since an early age he has also been a huge fan of the science fiction genre and has embarked upon his first set of sci fi books - The Exodus Star - a six-part series looking at a dystopian Planet Earth as it struggles to come to terms with the aftermath of the war to end all wars.

In the very early 1920s, the Godfrey Phillips tobacco company produced a series of cards to stiffen up the packets of their cigarettes. In the first print run there were initially 400 cards, but this rose to over 2,400 by 1924 and if you were to count all the different varieties of cards, both error and team changes, there amount to well over 3,000.

Paul began developing the books with one featuring his own club, Sunderland, in 2014 and quickly followed up with books on Manchester United, Newcastle United, South Shields & Durham City.

In 2015 Paul approached Dave Tomlinson and asked him to provide the player profiles for his book on Leeds United and the book was published later that year.

As Paul says on his website, 'Welcome to the antiquated world of footballers with soup-strainer moustaches, goalkeepers in flat caps and turtle-neck jumpers, international players proudly displaying their caps and players in their Sunday best clothes, raincoats and trilby hats. No long-haired layabouts, horrendous "mullets" or aggressively shaven heads to be seen here; no sponsors splashed across the front of these heroes’ shirts – in fact you’d be hard-pressed to spot as much as even a club badge on most of these chaps! These are the honest, hard-tackling footballers of the early 1920s, when football was a man’s game using a leather ball with laces that dented your forehead and the only people wearing coloured boots were women. Welcome to the world of the cigarette card footballer!'

The Pinnace collection is a fascinating one and are very rare, with Days only prodocing limited print runs, but certainly they're gorgeous pieces of work and well worth tracking down. The Leeds United edition is a wonderful one, capturing the stories and images of a club enjoying its first great coming. Don't expect a vast literary work, but you do get a history of the club from 1919 to 1931 and two or three paragraphs on each of the players featured in the cards which are included.

The 1920's saw the newly formed Leeds United side enjoy some extraordinary success, winning the Second Division title in 1924 and going close to First Division glory on a couple of occasions under the management of Dick Ray. In between times, however, they became renowned as something of a yo-yo club, but certainly Ray presided over the first great Leeds United team during his time at the helm. In 1929/30 Leeds finished an impressive fifth - by far and away the club's best position before the arrival of Don Revie. Willis Edwards and Ernie Hart were experienced internationals and helped the defence improve significantly. Things looked very promising for the future, especially when Wilf Copping came into the side at the start of 1930/31. Copping was ever-present that season and the Edwards-Hart-Copping half-back line was the powerhouse of the Leeds team until the fearsome looking left-half joined league champions Arsenal in 1934.

Other players featured in the book include captain Jim Baker, Matt Ellson, Bert Duffield, Billy Downs, Joe Harris, Jimmy Walton, Jack Lyon, Jimmy Frew, Tommy Lamph, Tommy Howarth, Basil Wood, George Mason, Jack Swan, Jimmy Moore, Len Armitage, Sam Powell, Alan Noble, Harry Sherwin, Percy Whipp and Russell Wainscoat.

You can buy a copy at Lulu.

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