Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for June, 2022

Posted June 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greetings to you all. Now that June is upon us and thoughts of summertime fun and frolic begin to fill the empty (or is it “not yet filled”?) spaces of our minds, I know that it is up to me to work even harder to bring you things on the ACHOF site that have enough intrigue to grab your eyeballs and whatever attention span you have left to take a look at and, if I’ve done my job right, enjoy and pass on to your friends and others you think might enjoy them as well. This month’s summary, I believe, has enough examples of “who is doing what” in the world of album cover art and packaging that it may be worth your while to put down the barbeque tongs for a minute, grab your favorite beverage and scroll down the page a bit to see what’s on offer.

In this month’s summary, you’ll find updated reports about new and ongoing exhibitions, news about the ongoing efforts and output of some of the top talents working in music packaging, new items available for sale (including several new books and some interesting new prints) or at auction and scores of other items on our favorite topics. One item I’m hoping you’ll look at is the link in the Exhibitions section to a virtual display of the recent show of photographer Richard Beland’s works at the Brian Liss Gallery in Toronto as its really well-done and shows off how today’s technology can be used to transport us to places we might not see otherwise.

ACHOF “Featured Fan Collection” Interview – Professors Jonathan Schroeder and Janet Borgerson

Designed for Dancing by Janet Borgerson & Jonathan Schroeder (MIT Press)

Posted May 27, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Last November (2021) I’d received a comment on the ACHOF site that read as follows – “My partner and I love album covers so much that we have written 2 books about it: Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (2017) and Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance (2021), both published by MIT Press. We range far and wide in the Designed for Dancing book and feature many rock n roll albums from the 1950s and 1960s. We tried to identity photographers, illustrators, and designers, and celebrate album cover art”. Now, considering that most of the submissions to the comments section are either complaints about things I’ve left out of a description or that I hadn’t praised or panned with sufficient vigor (or are spam links to CBD product sites), you must admit that this comment deserved some degree of follow-up, so I contacted the writer – Jonathan Schroeder, William A. Kern Professor in Communications, Rochester Institute of Technology – to learn more about them and their interest in album cover design.