DESIGNED FOR HI-FI LIVING

THE VINYL LP IN MIDCENTURY AMERICA

A focus on midcentury modernism provides intriguing connections between vinyl record album cover art and wider cultural movements and design trends. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the postwar imagination, the first part, “Home,” explores how the American home entered the frontlines of Cold War debates and became an entertainment zone—a place to play music, mix drinks, and impress guests with displays of good taste. The second part, “Away,” considers albums featuring music, pictures, and tourist information that prepared Americans for the jet age as well as the space race. With in depth looks at Columbia Records’ “Adventures in Sound” series and Capitol’s “Capitol of the World” series. We describe each one to tell a story of postwar America, as part of our “Analog Rescue” project.

Published in full color by MIT Press.

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Praise for Designed for Hi-Fi Living

“does not demand close reading, but rewards it…delightful and entertaining.”
– John Littlejohn, Popular Music and Society review.

“One of the smartest books we've ever seen on album cover art – a lavish full color volume that not only presents loads of classic images, but also has plenty to say about them as well!” – Dusty Groove Records, Chicago

Named a “Best Music Book to Broaden Your Horizons,” – Goodreads

“This extraordinary and brilliantly curated book reveals how the tropes of cultured living were disseminated through the universal medium of music decades before the era of ‘designer pop’. Revisionary and essential.”– Peter Saville, artist and designer; founder and art director of Factory Records

“A great read with thematic threads (and good writing!), but it really is all about the album art. I highly recommend it to illustrators, art directors and photographers.”
– Amazon reviewer

“Exploring the secret life of records, Borgerson and Schroeder comb the discarded and recovered bins of thrift-store vinyl for clues to a hidden agenda. At once hilarious and penetrating, their astute observations and thoughtful groupings cut across genre, label, and designer to reveal uncanny continuities that link jazz, rock, easy listening, self-help, exotica, folkloric, and other impossible to pin-down modalities in an eye-popping slide show of the mid-century American imaginary.”
– John Corbett, writer and curator; author of Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium and A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation

“A fantastic peek back into a forgotten world.”– Goodreads reviewer

“A brilliant book in several ways. Borgerson and Schroeder use album covers as windows on the homes of the 1950s, a world much scorned and little understood. This is both a rescue mission and an exploration of the unknown.”
– Grant McCracken, Twitter

Reviews and Accolades

BOING BOING
Flip Out With Book of Retro Record Sleeves, BOB KNETZGER, 7:27 AM SAT APR 30, 2022
READ ARTICLE

DROP THE NEEDLE: WAX IS BACK
And Northern Michigan Audiophiles Are Queued Up to Get You Spinning Again, BY CRAIG MANNING, JAN. 25, 2020
READ ARTICLE

Come Fly With Me
When Music Made You Want to Go Places, By Sudip Bose | December 7, 2017
READ ARTICLE

The Hi-Fi Generation
PRINT, The Daily Heller, “fascinating” by Steven Heller PostedJune 13, 2019
READ ARTICLE

Books of the Year –MidCentury Books

Best Rock and Roll Books in 2018 –Goodreads

Best books of 2017 –Financial Times

Best music books of 2017 –Vinyl Factory

The Look of Midcentury Sound –Wall Street Journal

"a handsomely illustrated volume" –Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise blog

“provides pertinent and relevant context for understanding a renewed vinyl boom in the digital age” –Songs My Sister Likes

An Excellent Study of How Record Sleeve Artwork Shaped Consumerist Values –Times Higher Education

Midcentury Visions of Christmas in New York –Medium

“a thoughtful and compelling perspective on the vinyl record as material culture” –International Association for the Study of Popular Music