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. I wish I could share my preferences, but too many links are involved and making choices is pretty difficult anyway.

Although each section here is divided by decade – Ochs makes some attempt to group album covers together based on similar image or artwork (often very tenuous) with varying degrees of success and to what purpose is unclear? He told me a story about how he kept all his records in his basement, and one time it began to flood. Scrutinising the cover of an LP record used to be a major part of the pleasure of acquiring and acquainting oneself with it.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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. Would have been nice to get a short sentence or two about each one, that's my only suggestion, because I'm sure there are interesting stories about each one, even if it's just a factoid or two. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an under-appreciated art form. Sometimes artists themselves got involved in creating them (hurray for Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell or John Lennon; bad, bad choice for Fish, although I love Marillion), other times famous photographers got to work on them - Annie Leibovitz or Storm Thorgerson, and let's not forget the famous cover Andy Warhol created for The Velvet Underground.Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for Andy Warhol's covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground.