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Best Album Art of All Time

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Columbia's Microgroove LP Makes Albums Sound GoodColumbia Records introduced the first successful microgroove long-playing phonographs way back in June 1948. But it took decades before album cover artwork came into its own.

To celebrate the LPs birthday, Wired.com's staff compiled the following list of stellar albums featuring mind-bending graphics and kick-ass inserts.

The Beatles: Revolver, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road
As with pretty much everything the band did, The Beatles set a trend, this time for LP covers, with the release of 1966s Revolver. Employing the illustrations of their pal Klaus Voorman and the photography of Robert Whitaker, Revolver ushered in the psychedelic era with force. It's name was even agreed upon while all four members worked on a psychedelic painting.

But The Beatles influential 1967 record Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band blew minds wide open. The Grammy-winning cover was created by art champion and director Robert Fraser, and married the work of designers Peter Blake and Jann Haworth with more than 70 artists, writers, thinkers and figures influential to The Beatles.

The Beatles themselves appeared alongside simulations of themselves, a nod to the death of Hard Days Night fueled Beatlemania. The cover, which included cutouts for mustaches and badges, eventually warranted its own legend for disciples who just love to Geek The Beatles. The whole epochal art project proved about 100 times more expensive than any cover made before. Its influence has been immeasurable.

By the time The Beatles got to their last proper album, 1969s Abbey Road, they stripped themselves entirely of simulations and presented four friends parting at the road responsible for pop musics most memorable sonics. And even that self-referential maneuver started a trend: Bands, including the naked Red Hot Chili Peppers, similarly walked across roads in ironic homage. Baby, that's art.

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