Essential Works

Art of the LP – and art of the shop window

Imagine our delight when our attention was drawn to the window display of this leading Amsterdam bookshop – a celebration of our Art of the LP book, which we created for Sterling Publishing.

The display belongs to Athenaeum Boekhandel, one of the Dutch capital’s best-known booksellers. It seems the shop’s book buyer was so taken with our title that he raided his own record collection to help promote it, and many of the LP covers you see in the picture are discussed in the book itself.

Written by Johnny Morgan and Ben Wardle, The Art of the LP highlights over 350 superb examples of album cover design dating from 1955 all the way up to 1995 – before CD’s stole the LP’s large-format glory. For good measure, the authors balance their pick of the best with some of the worst examples of the rest. Artists featured include the The Clash, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and Elvis Presley, but since the focus of the book is on the quality of the artwork rather than the prominence of the music, there are also plenty of less familiar and therefore all the more fascinating album designs.

“I’m hoping there are covers here that people don’t remember and might get people to search them out”, co-author Johnny Morgan told Reuters. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s a bit more underground. Baby boomers missed a lot the first time around. There’s a band called Gang of Four. Tickets for the reunion gigs were impossible to get.”

It’s all organised thematically, with topics like sex, ego, and politics making this a truly fresh look at the art of album cover design. Early reviews around the web suggest the book has certainly got music lovers talking, with The Daily Loaf calling this 400-page tome “a gorgeous example of the way a quality coffee table book should be put together” and examiner.com awarding it an impressive nine out of ten rating. The book’s available now.