utionized the market. His picture-cover albums of the early 1940s outsold the blank tombstones eight to one. In 1945, the introduction of self- selection in American record stores aided immeasurably in the shift toward more attractive record wrappers. Shoppers no longer requested records from clerks who retrieved them from walled storage shelves where only the spines showed. Rather, customers leafed through records in bins with rows of picture covers facing them. According to Jim Flora, Steinweiss's assistant and then art director at Columbia, "It was just like the supermarkets that came in around then. Instead of finding everything behind the counter, you went in with a grocery list, took a shopping cart and walked through, impulse-buying. That is what we were doing with records. You'd go in to buy a Heifetz violin concerto, for example, and see something else whose cover attracted you, and you would go out with two records instead of one."(5) In her study, Schmitz observes three general categories of album art: "painterly covers (the RCA Victor style); poster covers (the CBS/Columbia style); and highly graphic covers (found mainly at small, independent labels, but originating with David Stone Martin's covers for Moses Asch)."(6) Some of the early albums of 78s were magnificent designs with graphics on inside covers as well as on the fronts. Some had pages of texts inside, identifying music and musicians and explaining why the recordings were anthologized together. The first 33 rpm LPs were also rightly called ALBUMS in so far as they too gathered several recorded performances onto a unified disk. Like their multi-disk predecessors, LPs were anthologies. Transferred to one record, the original cover art was retained (minus endpaper art, if any) and the written pages were rearranged and edited to fit onto the single sheet at the back of the sleeve, the liner notes. LP cover art continued in the general pattern of the previous ...
