John Thompson - Do You Like Em Then?

Ah yes.

John Thompson – Do You Like ’Em Then? (2006)
by Stuart Archer and Bill Clark
Clark Art Ltd
ISBN: 9780955259104
Condition: Very Good (as sold by Crappy Old Books)

There are books about football.
There are books about art.
And then there are books about John Thompson, Rotherham United’s most recognisable voice, wrapped in paint, humour and northern soul.

Do You Like ’Em Then? is not a glossy Premier League corporate memoir. It is not ghost-written PR fluff. It is a celebration — affectionate, local, slightly irreverent — of a man whose voice boomed across Millmoor and beyond. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you’re about to.

Stuart Archer and Bill Clark capture the atmosphere of lower-league football culture — the chants, the terraces, the stubborn pride of clubs that don’t have global marketing departments but do have character. Lots of it. The kind of character that comes with a microphone, a sense of humour, and a catchphrase that becomes folklore.

This is football before everything became “content strategy.” Before every stadium announcer was rebranded as an “engagement facilitator.” Before someone decided that authenticity needed a consultant.

Expect:

• Paintings and illustrations that feel rooted in real terraces.

• Anecdotes that smell faintly of Bovril and programme ink.

• The sort of humour that doesn’t need explaining.

The title alone — Do You Like ’Em Then? — tells you what kind of book this is. It’s rhetorical. It’s cheeky. It’s proud. It’s Yorkshire.

Condition-wise, this copy is Very Good. Clean, solid, perfectly respectable. The sort of book you could gift to a Rotherham supporter and watch their eyebrows lift in recognition. No nonsense. No drama. Just a well-kept slice of football culture.

And here’s the quiet irony:

Books like this rarely survive. They get bought by fans, thumbed to death, left on coffee tables, or quietly disappear into lofts. They are hyper-local, deeply specific, and therefore — in a mass-market world — wonderfully unnecessary.

Which is precisely why they matter.

Available now from Crappy Old Books, where we rescue cultural artefacts that the algorithm forgot.

Do you like ’em then?

We rather think you might.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Stuart Archer and Bill Clark