Classic Album Covers of the 60s Hardcover – November 3, 2009

Five stars because you will find album covers in this book that you will not find in most other books because it is limited to the 1960's. Great full page photographs but not much information at all on the rock artist or the art artist, which is a shame.The best book I have found for information is "100 Best Album Covers" (1999) by Storm Thorgerson & Aubrey Powell. (See my review of same)."Rock Covers," (2014), Robbie Busch, et. al., is big (you will never be able to read it at night in bed), has beautiful pictures, but only about 1/3 of the album covers in the book have anything else except: "artist, title, year, label, art, photo," or some variation thereof. The other 2/3 have no explanatory text. Why this is so is unknown. Most pages have three album covers, with only one with text. So the information in this huge book on the music artists and art artists is skimpy (at least compared to "100 Best Album Covers.") But this book is the most beautiful of the album cover books, (which is published by Taschen)."1000 Record Covers," (2001) by Michael Ochs, is really just about that, with artist, label, year, design and photo, with little, if any text. But you will find some album covers here that you will not find anywhere else, especially from the 1950's, (which is published by Taschen)."A Brief History of Album Covers," (2008), is OK, but flawed. It has a lot of information on the music artist but only some entries have information on the art artist at all. E.g. pages 72-73 "Grateful Dead's" "Aoxomoxoa" L.P. cover from 1969, which had no information at all on the artist Rick Griffin. (See page 22 of "100 Best Album Covers" for this information.)Honestly, I would buy "100 Album Covers" first, and the any of the other album cover books.

The complete failure of this book to be a welcome addition to one's library is made all the more galling by the fact that in its original iteration it is a wonderful book with wonderful graphics. It is, in fact, my favorite of all the books that are out there depicting album art from the 60's. The original edition of this book is a large, hardback version. The one I'm reviewing here is hardback, but in a smaller size than the original. I suppose what went wrong was in the printing of the book. Some of the album covers are so bad that you can barely make them out while others are clear and fine. Two that are beyond bad are the Beatles "Sargent Peppers" and the Stones "Their Satanic Majesty's Request". Both of these are printed so poorly that you can just make out what you are looking at. Forget about trying to identify the famous faces on Sargent Peppers. This book should never have passed quality control. Amazon ought to be ashamed for selling such a defective product.I requested and did receive a return authorization from Amazon, but I would have to pay the return postage. This coupled with the fact that I used a promotional deal with American Express to get a $25.00 credit by spending a certain amount means I cannot return this piece of s*** but am stuck with it. I don't want to give it to anyone because I don't want to be responsible for perpetuating this kind of defective product anywhere with anyone.

A great collection of album covers, but the colors were not bright....quite dull.

If you collect albums this makes a great addition and makes for great reading. I bought it as a gift for my son and he enjoys having it around.

This is a gift for my son for Christmas. He is a musician but studied art. I think he will like it.

The most wanted thing – for me – are not the images, that are very good by the way, but the text that shows us the thinking of this great icon of albuns design. Thorgerson give us relations between visial artworks and music.

A great book! A good reference guide for album collectors.

Good Book

Always interesting to browse through old album sleeves, and there's an eclectic mix here among the more obvious old favourites. However the colour repro isn't that great, and a few pages towards the end of my copy had been left blank through a printing error.

I bought this book to go with a simular one I already have.As an O.A.P. I grow up with L.P's and this brought backa lot of memories for me. Very good to look at.

great reference book

Review some great music.

Some great album covers here, great for designers who want to draw inspiration or for anyone who remembers them or wants to learn more about the classic covers in the 60s.