If
music didn’t shrink with the advent of the CD, perhaps the experience of
listening has diminished? Did music look
larger in a wider format? And to drop the tone arm on the proper groove
demanded a modicum of effort repaid in pleasure; if nothing else, the packaging
for the music became smaller. Sure, some graphic artists rose to the challenge
of the jewel box, yet in many cases, the reduced size of the canvas led to a
reduction in visual creativity. And even the greatest LP covers look—indeed,
are—shrunken when transposed to the format of CD reissues.
The coffee table book Prestige Records: The AlbumCover Collection (published by Concord Editions) is a reminder of where and when the album jacket developed. One of the most significant postwar indie jazz labels, Prestige struggled to win a hearing for its artists. Catchy wrappings were just the ticket. According to the Collection’s editor Geoff Gans and label executive Ira Gitler in their introductory text, the earliest Prestige LPs were packaged in blank cardboard on the backside with the names of the artists on the front. Soon enough, the covers resembled simple promotional flyers. A few of those early efforts occupy the book’s early pages—usually a black and white photo of a horn player cropped and pasted onto a blank backdrop with names in basic black type. But like the music itself, the covers soon aspired to be more than functional. They wanted to be art.
The Album Cover Collection is designed to replicate the original format of the long-playing record, 10-inchs in diameter before 12-inch became standard. The pages are filled with images of front covers, presumably in chronological order to show the evolution of album art. The one glaring omission is the release dates of the recordings, but the photographers and designers who worked on the covers are credited.
Some pages bring discoveries. Over a decade before Andy Warhol designed his famous banana peel for the Velvet Underground’s debut, he penned in the wording for a Thelonious Monk cover in the curlicues familiar to students of his early commercial graphics. Mad magazine’s Don Martin executed some outstanding covers for Prestige, involving oddly misshapen humanoids and superb use of horizontal and vertical lines and color blocks.
Not every cover chosen for the Collection is good, which is probably just as well. Juxtaposing the mediocre with the superb reveals the full spectrum of design at Prestige in the 1950s and ‘60s. Whether or not you agree that vinyl had a warmer sound, The Album Cover Collection is convincing evidence that it was easier to produce visually compelling covers for the larger, vinyl formats of old.
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