Alex Steinweiss, who invented the album cover in the late 1930s, taking what had been a monochromatic surface and making it visually appealing, died on Sunday aged 94, a gallery has confirmed
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1917, the son of immigrant parents from Warsaw and Riga, Steinweiss was hired in 1939 to design advertisements for Columbia Records.
But he quickly gravitated to creating album covers for the new long-playing 33 1/3 rpm records then coming into vogue.
"They were like tombstones," recalled Steinweiss in a 2007 interview, referring to the covers of the 1920s and 1930s.
"I got busy with management and said that RCA/Victor was the main competition and their work was old hat. I approached them with the idea that it could be more exciting and that it would actually boost sales, despite the increased cost of production."
Steinweiss's first album cover, for a Rogers and Hart collection of songs, featured a theatre marquee with the words: "Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart".
Sales jumped 894 per cent, and a new genre, album cover art, was born.
During his 25-year career at Columbia, Steinweiss designed some 800 album covers.
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