no color, no personality." In about 1935, some of these designless "tombstone" albums, as they were called, first appeared with pictures pasted onto their covers. The first jazz album, "Chicago Jazz" (1939), consisted of six 78s bound in an album whose yellow cover bore simple blue designs and drawings of the musicians at the edges; producer George Avakian (who at the time was an undergraduate at Yale), wrote the enclosed booklet. The new pictorial albums came about because of several factors.(3) As the U.S. recovered from the Great Depression, records began to sell again and companies sought new, more aggressive marketing techniques. The W.P.A. had sponsored artists to design murals, book illustrations, and other works of nonspecialized audience appeal and the American public was more aware than ever of visual art as part of everyday life. Many of those who entered the new field of album cover design had worked for one or more of the Federal government's work relief projects and brought to the new job the radical consciousness of the era. It is not so surprising that David Stone Martin, for example, who had been a muralist for the Tennessee Valley Authority, became a master at designing albums of jazz music, called by a key book of the period "A People's Music."(4) Movie posters, book jackets, and magazine covers of the 1920s and '30s also doubtless had an influence on the first makers of cover art for records. Like the covers for books and magazines, album covers were not only advertisements for contents held within, they were the thing itself: the "advertisement" one would actually take home. Album designer Robert Jones recalls that in the 1950s hip young adults would display album covers on their coffee tables along with expensive art books and magazines. Though the very first "abstract" album covers of the late 1930s looked somewhat like wallpaper and generally did not sell, Columbia's covers by Steinweiss revol...
