Lost and Safe

Lost and Safe is the third album by The Books. It is in the same style of their previous albums, continuing their rich use of samples as diverse as Raymond Baxter ("That's the picture. You s-you see it for yourself."), W. H. Auden ("This great society is going smash / A culture is no better than its woods", from his poem "Bucolics: II, Woods"), and a reading of Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky". On "If Not Now, Whenever" Mal Sharpe asks a passerby "How're you doin' today?" Some of the sampled passages are either accompanied or performed elsewhere by guitarist/bassist Nick Zammuto in Sprechstimme. Some of the eclecticism of the samples is owed to their origins in Salvation Army shops.