Album Cover Album

This is a good compilation of album art up to the mid-70s, but there was so much good stuff that came after...

...but you can't fault the book for that.

I guess I would have liked more single-image pages, highlighting some of the absolutely incredible artwork on display, much of which ended up as a single tile of nine or twelve (shrinking the image to a couple of inches at best). Yes, it was illustrative of how similar some of the covers were, but still...

The joy of album art is the SIZE of the albums. So, the art was good, but the layout was less so.

Displaying album covers mostly from the 50s thru the 70s, this is a fantastic book. History of their original function as simple protective sleeves to creating a new image vocabulary (faces) for the artists themselves as the production evolved with new technology. Large format book which is a goldmine for record buyers from years back. Vinyl is not mentioned in the book but vinyl is now being sold again at bookstores. Pages of album covers which are recognizable for the most part instantaneously.