1000 Record Covers

Great book with a vintage library smell :)))

The book is very informative in terms of imagery of vinyl covers and is quite useful to have when only just starting to buy vinyls.

All record covers are interesting in a sense - 'how could someone have produced something so ugly?' - but this is a disappointing book for a UK reader. It seems to be based on US covers of pop music, many quite obscure, with many famous ones absent. There's not much text, and much of what there is is unreadable: one section consists of black print on dark green paper! Occasionally similar designs are juxtaposed, but the book is not illuminating and not well organised, be it by date, genre, popularity, significance or whatever. Still, it was cheap.

This is an interesting book but unfortunately this 2005 edition (ISBN: 3-8228-4085-8) is faulty as it omits all the 240 1950s covers included in the original 1996 printing ISBN: 3-8228-8595-9. I can vouch for that as I have both editions. It is a shame as the early sleeves are not often seen. This faulty edition should carry a sticker or disclaimer admitting that it omits the 50s and contains only 791 covers. A second-hand copy of the original black covered edition is preferable and well worth the hunt. Failing that this copy is still a good buy.

As said before, this book doesn't really take its purpose seriously enough. Although it does include a lot of great and controversial album covers (Blind Faith, Lennon and Ono's 'Two Virgins' to name a couple), a large amount of the book seems compiled with complete rubbish, notably the first 1/4 which appears to be more a collection of the cheesiest record sleeves that the author could find. Even when the book gets the bands right it often fails with the albums- despite including the Beatles' Hey Jude and Meet the Beatles, there's no White album, and artists such as Joy Division and Radiohead don't get a single cover printed.That said, the book is a nice one to have in the collection just for those who appreciate art and music and certainly doesn't fail completely- with 1000 separate covers there's certainly enough to make you pick it up once in a while, and the nice format and design of the book makes up for the strange omissions.

Rather dated - a disappointing lack of what I would consider to be the greats. However, was not expensive.

FANTASTIC