A few dull covers

The book has a sixteen page bibliography, twenty-eight pages of notes, references galore to mid-century culture and especially pop culture and for what: a visual analysis of almost 150 dull LP covers that the two authors have salvaged from record store bargain bins and second-hand sellers. Very few of these covers are worth a second look as they are just a bland confection churned out by record company marketing departments. Even the ones from the giants of the industry like: Columbia; RCA; Capitol are very poor examples of their output if they are meant to reflect mid-century living.

Capitol, in particular, put out quite stunning covers in the fifties and sixties. They were well designed with quality photography or illustrations combined with creative typography that made their covers sparkle and their backs were the best looking in the industry. The only Capitol one in the book that I would consider well designed is Tone poems of color with Frank Sinatra conducting Gordon Jenkins Orchestra (musically it's nothing special though) designed by Saul Bass. Some of the covers do have some professionally taken photos but usually ruined by hopelessly unimaginative typography. A lot of the covers could well be included in those websites that feature the world's worst LP covers.

The bulk of the book are spreads with a good reproduction of the cover (reduced down to 6.5 inches) on the right-hand page and some text on the opposite page. The authors sort of come unstuck here because most of this text just describes the cover image which the readers can see anyway, making a lot of the copy more or less redundant. I think it would have made sense to have chapter about how companies marketed LPs decades ago to a middle-class audience. The majors had huge back catalogs of tracks and it was necessary to come up with plausible ways of selling and reselling this material. For example RCA did a twelve album set called For hi-fi living featuring easy listening orchestras from the US and UK, all the tracks would also work for Columbia's Music for gracious living. The cover photos for both these LP sets were just generic images. A lot of the covers are from budget labels with a bland musical content bought for next to nothing within the music industry, photos from image libraries are used with the LP title and tracks just dropped anywhere on the photo. Luckily we don't get to see just how bad the backs are.

I'm surprised that the prestigious MIT press published this book of bland covers but that is not to say the theme of the book is wrong, it could have been interesting if there was a much more objective choice of covers, primarily from the major labels, budget ones had no interest in putting across a message with their output.