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.