I just got a hold of the beautiful new Taschen book Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover.  It was strange to think there was a time when there wasn’t album cover artwork, be it beautiful, clever, or just provocative. (Though I suppose I should get used to that time again with music as physical object quickly disappearing!)  It reminded me of other books about album covers I have enjoyed.   Check them out.  The list includes retropectives of album cover artists like Steinweiss, Flora, and Warhol; collections of genre-specific album covers (jazz, disco, hip-hop anyone?); and odd little gems about sleevefacing and Mingering Mike, a soul artist whose entire career is the invention of a teenage boy living in a D.C. ghetto.