"A deep dive into what remains for some the supreme Velvets LP, their self-titled third album, came out of a collaboration between three of the world’s most devoted Velvet Underground archivists — M.C. Kostek, Alfredo García, and Ignacio Juliá. I Met Myself In A Dream… That's the Story of the Third Album (The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society) is a limited-edition book centered on photos taken by Sandy Schor during and around the 1968 recording sessions. Intended as publicity stills and album art, the images have great intimacy: Reed tuning a 12-string Gibson hollow body; the band set up behind ratty padded sound baffles, preparing to record in real time; and in-studio smoking breaks (Mo Tucker seems a Marlboro gal). Shots illuminate Reed’s affectionate relationship with Tucker. In one, they grin at each other, maybe the tambourine they pass between them. In another, the band poses outdoors in a verdant wood, Reed very high-Sixties in velvet slacks and a flowered, ruffled blouse of sorts, doubled by Tucker in a wide collared man’s shirt and jeans. In portraits, Doug Yule looks soulful in paisley; ditto Sterling Morrison, in one photo almost literally hugging a tree. The book also documents the album’s physical release, marketing material, and a startling array of obscure press notices (about the only kind the band got at the time). At the tail end of 1968 — after the departure of John Cale and the souring of the band’s relationship with Warhol, in the wake of the King and Kennedy assassinations and the Chicago and Washington riots — the third album was born in tremendously dark times, not unlike our own a half-century later, and Reed’s music responded accordingly. “I’ve gotten to where I like ‘pretty’ stuff better,” he told his frenemy Lester Bangs, in a quote used in the book’s excellent introductory essay. “You can be more subtle, really say something and sort of soothe, which is what a lot of people seem to need right now.”