1000 Record Covers

Product Information

Ochs informs us of his initial aim in life, to listen to every rock record ever released and in addition, that this book represents a very small proportion of his 100,000+ collection of albums. Some of the 1970s images, implying rape or other sexual exploitation, are highly disturbing to the contemporary sensibility, and it's telling to speculate on how they could not have been so when originally produced. Cada portada está acompañada de una breve reseña que proporciona información sobre el álbum, la banda y el artista. Printed in eye-popping colour throughout, each has a caption of artist, title, year of release, record label, sleeve designer and extra notes. This special edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best 60s to 90s rock album covers from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and ex-record publicity executive Michael Ochs's enormous private collection.

Ochs also provides us with a written preface to each decade of covers, a resume of key developments in popular music which is somewhat cursory and futile to say the least. True, this hardbound version has fewer than a thousand record covers since it omits the 1950s covers found in the original softcover book, but it's still plenty of fun.This gives the advantage of enabling one to see correspondences, similarities, visual echoes between individual designs that can be fruitfully mined for their contemporary social and psychological significance. I bought it because I think album covers are cool to look at, and this provides hundreds of them, from simple "This is what we look like" photos to wilder art and concept images. There's not a lot to actually *read* in this 50-year survey of LP record-cover design, but the absence of text is more than compensated for by high-quality photo reproductions of a huge representative sample of what was a thriving art-form until the demise of vinyl records in the 1990s - and may yet become so again now the format has regained popularity. The form - a basic 12" x 12" framework - lent itself to as much detail as the artist cared to put in or to leave out, to instant impact, to portability, to duplication or triplication via the gatefold format, and presented itself as an artefact as solid as the record it contained.

My first job literally for the first month was sitting in a room with this one other guy and going through and pricing the entire Michael Ochs collection. I do wish there could've been included some more covers, but I guess they have to stick to that number - and the book *is* pretty thick already. A Christmas gift from my wife, this is an excellent book for anyone who loves music throughout the decades.

There is good, bad and ugly (sexism, underage person(s)) covers, though that might sometimes depend on the reader's taste.