In 2005 Disney released 'A Musical history of Disneyland', a lavish six-CD set issued to celebrate that park's fiftieth anniversary. It featured a host of rare and unreleased recordings from opening day right up to sounds heard in the park today, and has become a must for any Disney park soundtrack aficionado.

But that wasn't the whole package. Accompanying the CDs was a 72 page hardback book entitled 'The Sounds of Disneyland'. It's been mostly ignored by reviewers who have tended to concentrate on the music, but this excellent coffee table book is worth a look in its own right.

Just as the discs tell the story of the attractions in music, the book covers the same ground in words and pictures. It follows the same structure as the discs too, separating its subject into the various Lands of the park. So we have a chapter on Main Street, one on Frontierland, another on Critter Country etc. Each chapter is then further divided, with a section on each ride, show or attraction.

Author Stacia Martin packs her text with snippets of little known trivia. I didn't know for example that some of the sounds for the runaway mine car chase in the movie 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' were taken from the ride soundtrack of Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

The balance of words and pictures is excellent too. Martin perfectly illustrates her stories with a huge number of photos and concept paintings. For many people these will be the highlight of the book. It serves as a tribute to the work of renowned Disney artists like Herb Ryman, Marc Davis and Sam McKim, whose designs went such a long way to helping people envisage how sections of the park would look. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and these lovingly reproduced paintings prove that. It's fascinating to see, for example, such details as Mary Blair's stylised mural designs which were intended for Tomorrowland but later abandoned.

The book doesn't only cover the older attractions though. Just as much attention to detail is shown to more recent park additions like Mickey's Toontown or Fantasmic!, but inevitably, as with all things Disneyland, it's the stuff from Walt's time that satisfies the most. It's great to see details of the Country Bears' origins in the abandoned Mineral King Ski Resort project, or how the Carousel of Progress gave rise to Progress City and the first plans for Epcot.

If I have a slight criticism it's that the author assumes that the author knows who the artists and Imagineers are. She'll throw in a phrase like 'Tony Baxter said…' with no explanation of who he is. Then again, if you're the kind of Disney fan who'd be prepared to shell out the best part of $100 for this lavish set, then perhaps you'd be already aware of these people and their work. But that's a minor niggle. Overall it's a fantastic, well compiled volume.

Even without the soundtrack discs, this book would more than justify its place on any Disney park fan's shelf. But as part of that completed package it's unmissable.

Shaun Finnie is the author of The Disneylands That Never Were, a 250 page paperback detailing fifty years of rides, shows and attractions the Disney designed but never built.