(Collins Design)

www.harpercollins.com

Gather around, children. Uncle Freddie has a story for you. Once upon a time, in a milieu far, far away, the music delivery system of choice was not the digital download but a 12-inch diameter disc called the LP (or "album"). And unlike the thumbnail images of today, there was an accompanying visual artform - the album cover, typically a colorful 12" x 12" cardboard jacket.

In 1977, artists Storm Thorgerson, of Hipgnosis, and Roger Dean, of Yes sleeve fame, assembled an eye-popping book called The Album Cover Album. It was the first such effort to comprehensively bring together disparate-genre album art under one cover -just obtaining the permissions from record labels and copyright owners must've been a bitch - and while connecting the dots between, say, an austere/cool jazz sleeve from the ‘50s, the Stones' Warhol-designed Sticky Fingers and Dean's own cosmic Yes images may seem improbable, with hundreds of album covers arranged more or less thematically, those connections spring vividly into the foreground.

One page, for example, captures psychedelia in full bloom in the late ‘60s via surreal, vivid-hued album covers by the 13^th Floor Elevators, Quintessence, the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd. Another several pages zero in on, with a true fetishist's appreciation, the nude female form courtesy Boxer, Be-Bop Deluxe, Pioneers, Chakachas, Roxy Music, Jimi Hendrix and Ohio Players records. There also an entire section, "Devices & Disguises," devoted to unusual packaging and shaped/die-cut sleeves, such as the Small Faces' Ogdens Nut Gone Flake (an elaborate circular, overlapping design intended to suggest a tobacco tin), Alice Cooper's Muscle of Love (an unwieldy cardboard box), Gentle Giant's jar-shaped Octopus, and most notoriously, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, which came as a wraparound faux-newspaper. Try downloading that to your iPod.

This new edition of The Album Cover Album reproduces the original book with just a few layout tweaks, and the artifacts on display are nothing less than a visual orgy for fans and collectors. Included is a hilarious-but-helpful appendix that outlines the job description of a record company's art director and provides a step-by-step breakdown of how an album cover comes into being. One tidbit of info soberly advises, "Many people in the music industry treat record covers as packets of cornflakes." Which, in 2009, is perhaps even truer now than it ever was. FRED MILLS