What if Your Favorite Album was a Book?

Rock classics from from Arcade Fire to Zeppelin, reimagined as book covers.

The full library of Christophe Gowans' literary musical covers lives here. He's also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

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What if your favorite rock album was a book? Christophe Gowans was wondering the same thing. “I got to thinking, well, what would those records look like if they actually were books, if the name of the album was actually the title of a novel or reference book?” Gowans, a graphic designer who lives in London, did just that, reimagining everything from Air to Zeppelin as something you might find on your shelf or in a used bookstore. After creating the covers, he digitally ages them—”I know my way round a retouch or two”—to look as well-loved as the LP sleeves and CD booklets that accompany their musical originals.

The results are as idiosyncratic as the albums themselves. Prince’s Purple Rain is transformed into a sci-fi fantasy by one P. Rogers Nelson. The Beatles’ Abbey Road feels like a well-mannered Penguin Classic. Arcade Fire‘s The Suburbs looks like a Book of the Month Club hardcover selection circa 1955. Patti Smith’s Horses trades its famous Mapplethorpe portrait for the look of a popular series of kids’ reference books. And the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks looks like something you’d stuff under your mattress (and then wash your hands).

The full library of Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

The full library of Christophe Gowans’ literary musical covers lives here. He’s also collected his works in a book, The Record Books: Volume 1.

 


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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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