A Gallery of Steinweiss Covers: Postscript

About a year ago, I was posting on this blog a series of album covers by the great illustrator, the late Alex Steinweiss, who passed away last July, aged 94.  Well, four more sets featuring his designs came in the mail just yesterday, courtesy of Larry Woodlee at Vinyl Rehab, and so I post them here.  The first three of these date from 1946, and the last from 1947:

The Schumann cover was slightly disfigured by a sticker and a couple of address stamps of its previous owner, Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee; and so, my heartfelt thanks go to Peter Joelson for his work on restoring this image.

I'll be back with some more Ormandy uploads in my next post - stay tuned!

A Survey of Victor's Generic Covers, Part 2

In the last post I showed examples of the initial group of generic covers used for Red Seal album sets, all of them unveiled at the time when the brand name of the label was still officially just "Victor."  In the spring of 1946, "RCA" was added to the head of the brand name, making it "RCA Victor."  (The last Victor 12-inch Red Seal record I have seen with a "Victor-only" label is 11-9155, "The Bells of St. Mary's" and "The Lord's Prayer," by the Victor Chorale under Robert Shaw.  11-9156 is the first record of M-1050, the Bach Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky, an issue of May 1946.) Sometime thereafter, four new generic cover designs were unveiled, using the new brand name in a box, with a full-color representation of Nipper in another box to the right.  Two of these were signed by Frank Decker:

The following design is unsigned, though it looks like another Frank Decker to me:

And the last of these new covers was signed "stahlhut."  This is almost certainly Henry Stahlhut, who also designed covers for magazines like Gourmet and Fortune:

All of these designs, and the ones in the previous post, continued to be used by RCA Victor on 45-rpm sets and even on a few early LPs.

A Survey of Victor's Generic Covers, Part 1

I've been sharing a bunch of Alec Steinweiss' Columbia cover designs lately, including generic ones, and, for a change of pace, offer the answer of Columbia's main competitor, Victor, to some of those designs.  In 1943 Steinweiss unveiled an appealing generic design for back issues in the Columbia catalog to replace the drab "tombstone" cover.  Victor's generic covers were equally drab in the early 40s, but that changed, probably in 1945, with the introduction of four new cover designs signed by Frank Decker.  Here are two of them:

In 1946, the brand name "Victor" officially became "RCA Victor" on the labels and covers, and so the designs were modified, replacing "VICTOR Red Seal Records" with "RCA VICTOR Red Seal Records" in a box and adding a line-drawing of Nipper to the side:

As I said, there were four of these 1945 designs in all, but I do not have the other two in their original "Victor-only" form (though I know they exist, for I have owned examples in the past).  I do have them as 45-rpm sets, however, with the modified form:

There were four additional generic designs a year or two later, which will be the subject of the next installment.

Incidentally, fans of Steinweiss' work will want to obtain the Taschen book, formerly priced at $500 as a limited edition, but now at Amazon for $44.09 in general release.  It's well worth that, and contains over 250 of his cover designs for Columbia, Decca, London and other labels.  A magnificent production indeed!  The Amazon link is here.

Steinweiss' Generic Covers

Part 5 of my Steinweiss covers series is a survey of the various designs he did, or that I suspect he did, for Columbia Masterworks 78-rpm sets.  From about 1940 to 1943, Masterworks sets without unique covers (and this was the vast majority of them) came in plain grey covers with the title and artist information enclosed within a box, as shown in my earlier post this month devoted to Enrique Arbos' Spanish Album.  The highest-numbered sets that I have seen with this type of cover (nicknamed the "tombstone" cover in collectors' circles) are M-537 (Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12, by the Budapest Quartet) and X-234 (Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole, Rodzinski/Cleveland), both from 1943.  After that, an attractive new generic design was unveiled which, though unsigned by Steinweiss, appears to be his work (in particular, the lower-case rendering of "columbia" is a hallmark of his style).  I like to call this the "polka-dot" cover, and it appeared with three background colors - black, blue and maroon:

This was used for all extant sets in the back catalog without unique cover designs, as well as a few new sets like the Barber and Haydn symphonies pictured above.  The highest-numbered sets I have seen with the "polka-dot" cover are M-578 (French Arias by Martial Singher) and X-256 (Elizabethan Suite by Bartlett and Robertson).

The next generic cover design appeared in 1947, and it is the only one that's actually signed by Steinweiss.  It features a Greek statue in the background, three large spots for work, artist and album details, and smaller spots showing various instruments, a singer and a conductor.  This came in four background colors - red, blue, green and what was probably meant to be gold or bronze, though in practice it usually shows up as a rather icky shade of yellowish-tan.  Collecting Record Covers has several examples of the blue and gold, so I present here a red cover (I don't have a green one):

Again, this was used for all extant sets in the back catalog plus a few new ones.  The highest-numbered that I have seen with this design are MM-730 (Brahms' Violin Sonata No. 3, by Issac Stern) and MX-288 (Ravel's Left Hand Concerto, by Casadesus and Ormandy).

In 1948 came not one, but at least four new generic covers, keyed to various genres of music.  For example, orchestral music was issued with this cover:

String and chamber music with this one:

and all other instrumental music with this type of cover:

Vocal music was issued with this type of cover:

All of these cover designs came in a variety of colors as well.  I've also seen green and red for the conducting hand, and light blue for the strings.  These designs were used primarily for new issues, with back issues continuing to use the Greek statue of 1947.  Original Steinweiss designs became fewer as the set numbers passed c. MM-750 and MX-300.  Actually, all Columbia 78 sets from this period are pretty scarce, since Columbia introduced the LP about this time and sales of 78s plummeted.

A Gallery of Steinweiss Covers, Part 4

Today is Alex Steinweiss' 94th birthday!  For my next installment of the Columbia Masterworks Steinweiss gallery, I present the last covers in my collection that adorn the sets with MM- prefixes (i.e., the Masterworks 78 sets of three records or more), beginning with a couple that I missed earlier.  The "Robin Hood" set (MM-583) is from late 1945, and the Beethoven "Pastorale" (MM-631) numerically belongs to 1946 though it must have been issued out of sequence, as the cover bears a date of 1947.  My copy of this, alas, is not in very good condition - there were some brown spots along the right side which are not part of the design! My thanks to Peter Joelson for his restoration work on this image.

The next two covers (MM-688 and MM-703, both from 1947) have appeared on this blog before, when I uploaded transfers of the recordings contained therein.  But here they are in sequence, and with the left border displayed this time (which, unfortunately, display water damage caused by the Great Georgia Flood of 2009):

Finally, two from 1948.  I've also seen the Mahler 5th (MM-718) with a generic cover.  My guess is that Columbia rushed copies of this set to the stores for the 1947 Christmas trade before the cover shown here was ready (the generic-cover copy that I saw had Christmas 1947 greetings to the original owner written inside):

 To be continued, with a survey of Steinweiss generic covers....

A Gallery of Steinweiss Covers, Part 3

The Steinweiss gallery continues with seven Columbia Masterworks covers from early 1947.  Here are the first two, MM-644 (a ten-inch set) and MM-650:

The next two are MM-652 and MM-661.  Steinweiss often used a hammer-and-sickle motif on covers featuring works by Soviet composers - remember, the USSR were still officialy our friends in 1947:

Someone at Columbia had a wicked sense of humor, reserving for the "Messiah" set the fatal number of MM-666! This set is in two volumes, with the same cover design used for both:

To continue, with MM-669 and MM-671:

Immediately following this was perhaps the cleverest Steinweiss cover of all, that for MM-672, the Delius Violin Concerto.  It's just been posted by Collecting Record Covers - don't miss it!

To be continued...

A Gallery of Steinweiss Covers, Part 2

For my next installment of Columbia Masterworks album covers by Steinweiss, I present six covers from late 1945-early 1946.  Here are the first two, MM-589 and MM-591:

This cover for the Ormandy Beethoven Ninth (MM-591) is one of two unique Steinweiss designs for the same set.  The other, which I possessed many years ago but no longer do, showed four hands - one white, one black, one red and one yellow - coming from each side of the cover at right angles to touch a globe in the center, all on a light blue background.  This graphic illustration of "alle Menschen werden Brüder" must have been controversial at the time, and may have been replaced by the above, more innocuous cover; however, I have no way of knowing which design actually came first.  To continue with two more covers (MM-596 and MM-604):

MM-604, incidentally, was Issac Stern's debut recording.  To continue, with MM-608 and MM-570:

Though the Ormandy "New World" with its album number of MM-570 would appear to be out of sequence here, it actually was issued after the Franck Symphony, whose individual record numbers are 12312-D through 12317-D, while the Dvorak's are 12328-D through 12332-D.

To be continued....

A Gallery of Steinweiss Covers, Part 1

No links to sound files in this post - sorry!  In my last post I stated my intention to devote an entire entry to those wonderful Alex Steinweiss covers for Columbia Masterworks 78 sets.  Since writing that, I have discovered a marvelous blog, Collecting Record Covers, which is in the process of systematiclly putting up scans of all the Steinweiss covers, classical and popular, that the blogger, who specializes in collecting record covers, owns.  And this blogger owns a lot of them - far more than I!  So, in these posts I will merely fill in the gaps that I perceive, all scanned from albums in my own possession.

Steinweiss, as many of you may know, was the art director at Columbia from 1939 through the 40s, and in this capacity designed over 300 covers for the Masterworks series alone (along with quite a few for the Popular and Children's series).  His first Masterworks cover appears to be that for Set M-415, "Music of Victor Herbert" conducted by Kostelanetz, which appeared in 1940 (this is pictured at the above-mentioned blog, in a far better scan than I could manage).  There were, of course, earlier-numbered sets for which his cover designs exist, but they seem to have all been reissues of sets that had previously appeared with plain generic covers.  Here are two of those:

The Mahler was originally released in 1937, the Fauré early in 1939.  Steinweiss's designs date from c. 1943-44.

In the early years of his work for Columbia, Steinweiss appears to have focused on designing covers for the Popular sets; relatively few of the Masterworks sets numbered in the M-400's (roughly, 1940 to 1942) have his designs.  By the time the series hit M-500, however, a majority of the Masterworks sets were carrying his designs, and, from roughly M-550 to MM-700 (1945-47), almost all of them did.  Here are a couple from late 1942:

This cover for the 10-inch set of Schumann "Frauenliebe und Leben" isn't signed by Steinweiss, and therefore may not be his, but the Mendelssohn "Scotch" Symphony definitely is.  Both date from 1943:

And here are two from 1945 (the Lily Pons set is another 10-inch set):

To be continued....