The excellent Capitol fiftieth anniversary book, you can look inside it here:
What an odd Taschen publication, from the carrying case (it's that heavy) and unnecessary foldout jacket to the 492-page book basically full of large publicity shots of Capitol recording artists. The first five chapters have text that breezily skips over the company's history each followed by pages and pages of stock star photos. The back of the book has the most interesting material. Design historian Alan Hess writes a quite detailed piece on the architecture of the Capitol Tower and Sean Wilentz covers the famous recording studios.
The last fourteen pages feature seventy-five of the company's best albums as decided by an unnamed advisory panel and illustrated with mostly rather bland covers. Strangely these are the only covers in the book, Capitol for years had beautiful LP covers (and well-designed backs, too) but the book's editors decided to go with photos throughout the book.
For those who want a more thorough history of this famous label, you'll have to search out the large size, 220-page Capitol's fiftieth-anniversary book. A sumptuous title full of articles, photos, covers and exuberant graphics that was given away free in 1992 (a few copies of the hardback and paperback can still be found on the net).
I think this Taschen book was heavily subsidized by Capitol as a PR exercise, how many young adults who buy the company's music would pay such a high price for this chunky book?
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