In 1940, Columbia Records’ then art director Alex Steinweiss pitched a bold, new idea: why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months record sales increased by over 800 percent. Thus, the album cover as we know it was invented. Steinweiss created a contemporary graphic art form with his concept, and his covers for Columbia took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. Over three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest; as well as logos, labels, adverting material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. This comprehensive volume from Taschen presents an overview of how Steinweiss’ launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow.