A FEW YEARS AGO, on a pilgrimage to Graceland, I ran into two sisters from New Orleans - late teens, one with a baby in her arms. Why, I asked, had they come all the way to Memphis? Weren't they too young to be interes-ted in Elvis? They looked at each other and giggled before explaining: “Man, he was hot!”

Indeed he was. In 1958 my friend and I would sit with ears close to the gramophone, squealing in ecstasy because in Love Me Tender you can actually hear the soft intake of Elvis's breath. Fifty years later, I write looking at a blind patterned with Warhol cowboy-Presleys and listen to the King on my jukebox surrounded by Elvis fairylights. It is as if the squalid death in Graceland never happened and the marvellous boy from Tupelo stays young and beautiful for ever. After all, a Channel 4 poll in 2007 had Elvis in second place among the ten greatest sex symbols, behind Angelina Jolie but three places ahead of the next male, Brad Pitt.

That piece of trivia comes from the King-sized Elvis Encyclopedia, which is yet further proof that Elvis is still hot - as in being a perpetual hot property. As the incomparable rock writer Greil Marcus has pointed out (in Dead Elvis) Elvis's afterlife is making money: this is a dead man who earns about $50 million a year. Adam Victor has followed his compendium of all known facts about Marilyn Monroe with this remarkably handsome volume on another modern icon - the greatest rock artiste of our time, and (arguably) the most influential singer of any time.

If you want to know about Elvis and guns and telephones, how many paternity suits were filed against him, what books he read and even what breed of dog he gave his last-but-one girlfriend, this book is for you. As a visual compendium of Elvis and his times the work is outstanding, and students of rock'n'roll history have a valuable resource of quotes, pictures and facts - for every detail of every single record is here, as well as the names of musicians he worked with, those singers he influenced and the credits for all his movies, down to “Colonel Tom Parker - technical adviser”. (The old rogue looked after himself more than he looked after the genius he managed.) Victor notes that his encyclopedia is “longer than the Old Testament”; certainly to fundamentalist Elvis nerds it will be as valuable as the Bible.

Mistakes? He made a few - I mean Adam Victor, not Elvis. It shook my confidence just a little to see, under “Motorcycles” that Elvis had an “Electric Glide” Harley-Davidson (actually it's Electra-Glide, folks) and to notice with irritation that two photographs of Elvis with one of his Harleys are actually printed back to front. People with their own particular obsessions are bound to find flaws; they are perhaps inevitable in an undertaking as monstrous as Elvis's later taste in clothes.

Bob Dylan said that hearing Elvis for the first time “was like busting out of jail” and Al Green's accolade is worth noting when detractors accuse him of “stealing” the sound of black rhythm and blues singers: “He broke the ice for all of us.” Nobody now - not even a newly-converted Elvis fan like Adam Victor - can fully comprehend what it was like to hear that voice for the very first time, smashing into the straight-jacketed Fifties with the snarl of Hound Dog. It changed us for ever. Innocent pre-pubertal girls like me lost our virtual virginity listening to Stuck on You and Are You Lonesome Tonight and defied our parents by ruining the bedroom wallpaper with openly sexy Presley pictures. You did not have to see those famous pelvic movements to learn from the raw thrust in the voice that it was good to be bad. Nothing in Elvis's later career, not the dud songs and films, nor the terrible shows, nor the increasingly desperate lifestyle, can tarnish the myth of the poor white boy who walked into Sam Phillips's Sun studio in 1954, sang That's All Right (Mama) and rocked our blues away, for ever.

The Elvis Encyclopedia by Adam Victor
Overlook Duckworth, £40; 420pp Buy the book

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