While most of the buzz about the resurgence of vinyl records has focused on the skyrocketing sales of grooved discs designed to spin on turntables, the vinyl renaissance has reminded many of us old-timers how much we missed the album-cover art on record jackets. Whether it was using the gatefold of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to clean a Baggie of pot or getting lost in the psychedelic lettering of “American Beauty,” album-cover art was an important part of how multiple generations of fans experienced music.
That experience became less and less common in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when the rise of cassettes and CDs shrunk the dimensions of the artwork on album covers from 12-inches square to just five, or even less. A few decades later, beautiful and intricate album-cover art was being crammed onto the tiny thumbnails that accompanied digital music played on handheld devices.
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