Ancient Web: Dana Countryman Built a Virtual Museum of Strange LP Sleeves

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some record sleeves were designed to sell the music. Others appear to have been designed on a dare. Dana Countryman wanted both kinds on display, especially the ones that made him wonder what the art director was thinking.

Browse Dana's Virtual Museum of Unusual LP Cover Art.

The gallery presents itself as a personal collection, with a few additions contributed by friends. Countryman celebrates the enormous twelve-inch square as a canvas in its own right, explaining that he enjoys beautiful sleeves, campy cheesecake artwork, and covers too strange to have come from an ordinary design meeting.

There is almost no database machinery here. The page instructs readers to let it finish loading before scrolling, then organizes photographs into loosely defined categories. Cheesecake covers lead into dancing, electric organs, clowns, atrocious design decisions, and unusually impressive artwork. Every few rows Countryman adds a personal aside before inviting visitors to click on a sleeve for a larger view.

When a collector became his own museum curator

Countryman floats the idea of making a coffee-table book about his favorite oddities, then decides that putting them on the Internet is a perfectly good alternative. The gallery offers precisely the kind of personal judgment that institutional catalogs rarely contain: he is delighted by some of the design disasters and genuinely admiring of others.

Its historical significance is corroborated outside the artist's own site. In September 2004, The Guardian pointed readers toward Countryman's virtual museum in a short guide to eccentric album-cover sites. A 2006 design blog likewise named it as a place to explore more unusual artwork.

Those contemporary references establish that the collection existed and attracted outside attention by 2004, but they do not prove a precise launch date or overall popularity.

The surviving page has no pretense of comprehensive discography. Records are arranged by what delights, baffles, or amuses one owner, not by label number and release year. Some image links may no longer function, and the original sleeve art remains subject to its respective rights.

Explore the first gallery and follow its link to page two.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.