Image sells music; today, that's pretty much a given. But we can trace that idea straight back to the art designer Alex Steinweiss, who in 1940 sold Columbia Records on the idea that it could improve sales by replacing the plain brown paper wrapping on 78 rpms with something far more eye-catching. Aside from that stroke of marketing genius, and as this gorgeous, 400-plus page coffee table book amply demonstrates, Steinweiss (who

—Anastasia Tsioulcas